The story ideas I had in January

Over the years, I’ve often bragged/complained that I have too many ideas for stories.  Admittedly, a lot of them suck, but surely there are some good ones I could write if I had a few centuries to actually get to all of them.  But you’d basically just have to take my word for it.  Well, sometime last December I was thinking about this and I thought, What if I just keep track of all the story ideas I have for, say a month, and put it up as a blog?  So that’s what I did.  Here are all the story ideas I had during January. 

Now, when I say ideas, what I mean are usually the “What if X?” beginnings of an idea that with a lot of work could be turned into an actual story.  Most of these, the bulb went off and I spent a minute or two figuring out what that could mean.  I then jotted it down, and most of them I didn’t think about again until I wrote up this post.  Some of these ideas could be fully explored in short stories of a few hundred words, while others could easily be novels. 

I’ve roughly grouped them to make things a little easier to follow.  Some of these grouped ideas happened within days of each other, while some were separated by weeks.  I suppose I should have also made a note of what I was thinking about when these bulbs went off, but I didn’t think to do that.  Maybe if I try this experiment again in a year or so.  We’ll see.

Ideas I actually got around to writing

I got the idea for “A Line in the Sand” after Trump spouted off nonsense about Greenland and Panama.  And I started wondering how a true leader would react to his BS.  “Not Worth It” similarly came about after some BS Musk posted. 

Speaking of rich pricks, I had an idea for story where all us peasants got together and purged the millionaires.  They were given the choice of their money or their lives, and a surprising number chose death.  Part of the story would be a monument to the morons who thought life wasn’t worth living with only $999,999.  While I didn’t write a full story for that idea, I did write a microfiction story which I posted.  Which is why I’m including it here.  As well as the haiku I posted that came from the idea for a story set in January 2029 that showed how things were so much worse than in January 2025.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing the two full stories from these ideas, but at least I got something out of them.

Unwritten story ideas

I had my first story idea not even half an hour into January.  I was thinking about my story “Legacy,” which I had started writing in December and just polished up to post in January.  The idea begins with us forcefully moving all the billionaires to Mars.  Then the idea split into would we just sit back and watch them Lord of the Flies themselves, or would we just nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure?

Speaking of billionaires on Mars, another idea had a bunch of them going to Mars, but then the Earth – where all their wealth was concentrated – is destroyed.  So overnight they become penniless paupers who have to start doing manual labor since there won’t be anyone on Earth to support them.

And speaking of billionaires obsessed with Mars, I had the basic idea of Musk actually being an alien sent here to see if we are advanced enough to make contact with.  It’s likely that we failed because we didn’t realize he was an alien. 

Since I brought up Musk, I might as well segue into the political ideas I had.  The first I’ll talk about is your basic political scandal story as the First Lady has an affair with one of the President’s advisors.

Another bare bones idea was for a reporter pushing Trump or one of his advisors into admitting that all the campaign promises were just lies to gain votes.

Another Trump inspired story is one where the rest of the world moves on to clean energy, while in the US we stay with fossil fuels.  But then one day, the rest of the world shut down all their wells and stop selling us their dirty fuel.  And we’re caught in the lurch because planning ahead for a day without fossil fuels is apparently woke, or whatever term they will use for the lack of basic common sense.   

Lacking common sense led to another story idea.  Some people think the country should be run like a company.  But what would it mean to be “let go” by your country?  This led to this hypothetical exchange: “Your grandparents didn’t meet their quota last month, we have to let them go.” “They’ve worked here for decades!” “But they didn’t meet their quota.  What do you not understand about that?”

The last political idea I had came when I realized I should write a sequel to my story “Other Means.” That was written during the campaign, and I thought it would be interesting to see the characters thoughts now that Trump is back in office.

From politics, lets move on to AIs.  Probably the vaguest idea I had was that the reasons AIs in movies and such always hate people, is because people developed a hatred for AIs after years of corporations cramming AI into everything.  Like, we don’t need an AI in our toaster.  I’m not sure if that’s a thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was trying to do that.

From hating AIs, I wondered about the assassination of the first “real” AI, a sentient being like we see in movies, not the crap now that gives people eight thumbs.  The point of the story would be that people actually feel sorry for it. 

The last AI related story is about a guy who finds a “rare” coin in his change.  Like, he thinks he might be able to retire just from this one coin.  But it turns out the app he has to check the value of coins is just this AI hack job that gives out random numbers and means nothing to actual coin collectors. 

Moving on, I had an idea for this Fox News type show going on and on about this evil socialist who healed people, without charging them a cent.  They would warn their viewers to be on the lookout for this Jesus Christ character.  Because someone against corporations making a profit off your health has to be anti-American.

Speaking of alternate realities, I had an idea of a writer who creates such great dystopian fiction.  How do they do it?  Well, they live in a better world with a portal that they can open up to peek into our reality to get ideas.  Which now that I write that up, sounds like the most basic “edgy” story a high schooler would write. 

Which brings us, not to an original idea for a story, but to a redo of a story.  I wrote a blog post about Rewriting the same story, about this book I read years ago of the collected short stories of an author.  Something of interest I found, is that there were a couple of stories that were basically the same, and part of me wondered if the author liked the idea and just rewrote the story every few years.  This led me to think I should dig out one of my earliest stories and write a new version of it.  Hopefully, I’ve grown as an author over the years and I could turn out a higher quality product. 

The last writing story idea I had was for a writing couple to be flirting with, either their failed story ideas or with the rejected stories.

Some of the oldest human art are of hand stencils on cave walls.  I had the idea for a spacesuited astronaut making some glove print painting on some lunar boulder.

And another moon story came after I watched the video The Search for Apollo 10’s Lunar Module.  The idea would be a mission to find Snoopy – the name of Apollo 10’s Lunar Module – and take it to the moon as a museum piece. 

And now the group of ideas for things that didn’t really fit into a group.  The first is the idea of an online store that hires parents to take their cranky, screaming kids into physical stores.  All so people might think to do their shopping online instead of having to deal with screaming kids.

Someone finds a message of some sort on a dollar bill.  For whatever reason, the message really speaks to them, and they wonder about the person who left it.  Then we find out the person who left it had entirely different reasons for writing it on a bill.

Something happens that makes everyone perfectly healthy and roughly twenty-five years old.  From ninety-year-olds on their death beds to newborns.  What happens then?  This was another weak idea in that there are a million ways to take this, most of which would suck.  For this to be an okay idea, there would need to be some interesting hook to one of these million ways.

To end this section, here’s the idea I probably put the most work into.  I recently got around to rewatching Dark, which I’ve been meaning to do for the last … six months or so.  While it is one of my favorite shows, there are some issues with it.  And as I rewatched it this time, I thought about what I could do differently if I were to make an American version.  Basically, there are some loose ends I’d like to fix.  But I eventually realized that the story of Dark wouldn’t really fit in America.  If you took the skin of the story and pasted it onto America, there would be a lot of weird spots where things don’t fit because the underlying bone structure of America is different from that of Germany.  If that makes sense.  So instead of an American Dark, I started thinking about a Dark-inspired story set in America. 

This is the opening scene I came up with.  There is a sheriff of a small town somewhere out west driving around one evening.  At the edge of town he sees a man in an army uniform stumbling along.  The sheriff stops and asks what’s wrong, and the guy – who has some injuries – is babbling about a train.  The sheriff sees the name, I don’t know, Jones on the uniform, and asks if he is Corporal Erik Jones, and the guy says yeah.  So the sheriff puts him in handcuffs and puts him in his car.  But instead of going to the jail or even the hospital, the sheriff takes him to a nice house with a gate.  He buzzes in, and a guy asks angrily if he knows what time it is.  The sheriff replies that “They have a visitor,” and the gate opens.  The sheriff takes the man into a basement room and ties him to a chair.  The owner comes in and starts questioning Jones.  At first about who he is and we find out that this twenty- or so-year old guy in modern times was born in the 50’s.  Then the owner starts asking what was on the train, but Jones says he doesn’t know.  So they shoot him in the leg, but he still claims he doesn’t know anything.  He was just added security, that’s it.  So they kill him. 

Then we see a big board labeled “The Missing” with photos of dozens of people.  Some have been crossed out.  The first name on the list is Corporal Erik Jones who is shown to have disappeared on some date in the seventies, and they cross out his name.  Then maybe a flyover of the town ending on a monument with a plaque for those – including Jones – who died in a train derailment back in the seventies.  (In case you’re wondering, he was assumed dead, but they never found a body.)

The idea is there was something – maybe from a crashed alien ship? – the military was transporting by train when it derailed.  As a result, there are now … time doors, that appear at random times and locations around this town.  By knowing when and where they are, you can travel through time.  And there is a secret society working towards some goal.  Probably, there are two or three groups, sometimes working together, and sometimes working against each other.

What the series would actually be about and who all the characters would be, I didn’t get that far.  Maybe if a network gave me money for a treatment, I’d hammer something out.

Dream ideas

Speaking of dreams, I don’t know if me being a writer is part of the reason, but I have weird dreams.  And every now and then I’ll half-wake up from a dream and think it would make for a fantastic story.  Although what almost always happens is I think about it for a minute when I’m fully awake and realize it’s just gibberish.  Like the kind an AI could come up with.  (A couple months ago I had the idea that our dreams are just AI hallucinations.)  Anyway, here are the two dream ideas I had I thought would work.

The first had a group of people playing poker to see who had to deal with some annoying character.  Apparently, the loser had to take this apprentice jester.  What that meant, I don’t know.

The other dream came in two parts.  In the first part there was a pile or rocks about a mile from my house, so I walked to them.  But I wanted to take them back home, and it wasn’t until I got to the pile that I realized it would be easier if I drove.  Especially since they were more boulders.  But since I was there I started smashing them, while also hiding from any cars that went by.  And then I was back home where a wizard – possibly even Snape – was going around the house trying to find these portals that let you collect gems.  It was like being inside a video game.  I had already collected these gems, but the puzzles had reset, but I couldn’t remember how to do them.

Now when I half woke up from this, I thought it would make for an interesting idea that I knew I had to remember for this list.  But when I fully woke up, I couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to be.  Maybe an AI does write my dreams.

Lost idea

I did pretty well keeping track of ideas, but there is one I lost.  Basically, just as I got home from work one night, I was getting out of my car when I had an idea for some story.  I stopped and thought it was pretty good, and I would need to remember it.  Well, I went inside, took care of some things and heated up some leftovers.  It was twenty or so minutes later I sat down in front of my computer and I remembered I had an idea, but I could not remember what it was. 

***

So that’s it.  Those were the twenty-five (if I counted correctly) story ideas I had during the month of January.  Most of them suck, and I will never do anything with.  But a few could be something.  If new ideas don’t crowd them out.

Voter registration drive book sale!

 The other day I saw something about the deadline to register to vote for some special elections is like, next week.  I don’t live anywhere these special elections are happening, so I haven’t paid much attention to them.  But every election is important, especially now.  If you want to vote, you need to be registered.  And who knows what new hoops will be added to the registration process in the coming years.  So if you are an American citizen over eighteen, now’s the time to register.  The information to do so should be on your state’s website, but you can also check out Vote411.  And if you’re already registered, these sites should also let you check your voter status, because while voter lists need to be updated as people move or die, some go overboard.  Any “mistake” found now can be fixed long before the next election, making the election run smoother.

To draw a bit of attention to this, and to give some slight encouragement to register, I’m running a book sale from Monday February 24th, through Friday February 28th.  For that week, four of my ebooks will be free to download on Kindle.  I think it is against the law for someone to offer you something to register to vote, but it’s not like I’m offering you a million dollars to vote.  And it’s only four ebooks from an unknown author just to register.  If I was rich and famous, I’d be doing other things to pull democracy from the jaws of authoritarianism. 

If you’re not an American, you can still grab my ebooks.  I just ask you to participate in your government however you can.  Since America is no longer the leader of the free world, someone else will need to step up.

***

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Useless Cogs

Useless Cogs is a collection of forty, of my science fiction stories. They range from only a few dozen words to a few thousand and are filled with time travelers, AIs, clones, aliens, even sexbots, although not often as you would imagine. As example, there’s a time traveler that’s always a step behind, an AI that’s late on rent, and a sexbot with bad software. Some of the stories are humorous, some horrifying, and some … depend on your point of view.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, “The Only Certainty” follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

Random Writing Tips – Flubs

 

Nobody is perfect.  How often have you been talking with friends and somehow mispronounce a word you’ve said a million times before?  Or how often have you had to sneeze while on a date?  Stuff like that happens in reality all the time.  But we rarely see it in fiction.

If you’re watching a movie and a character mispronounces a word, nine times out of ten it’s to show that they’re nervous.  Probably while asking out their crush.  And if anyone sneezes, it’s for some plot reason, like they’re trying to hide from the bad guys.  The main reason for this, in my opinion, is for … who knows how long writers have been told that if some scene, or bit of exposition, or dialogue doesn’t advance the plot, it should be cut.  On one hand this is good advice, because if you spent page after page describing in detail a character getting in their car and driving twenty minutes to work, it would be extremely boring.  But on the other hand, after reading hundreds of stories where EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, readers have been trained to expect EVERYTHING TO BE IMPORTANT.  And realistic flubs and sneezes don’t advance the story.

Having characters flub lines or whatever can be useful in writing, other than showing they’re nervous.  I can imagine a story where a character makes three or four flubs.  At first the reader wonders why the writer included them when they are of no importance.  But when they can’t figure it out, they may chalk it up to just an odd writing style.  So when the next plot heavy flub happens, they just read by it and don’t think anything about it.  And when they do realize there was a plot reason for the latest flub, they may go back and reread the story to find the reasons for the earlier flubs.  Of course, as with every writing trick, there is risk in this.  A reader may decide they don’t care for this odd writing style, or they may get disillusioned when they can’t find a plot reason for every flub. 

The origin of this post is a random scene I half-remember in a book I read maybe thirty years ago.  A character did a very realistic thing that served no purpose to the story.  And I was left wondering why did the author bother to write that.  At least, if there was a purpose for it, my teenage self didn’t pick up on it.  Over the years I’ve often thought I should reread the book, just so I can find this scene and figure out the meaning behind it.  But it’s never been a priority, and I admit I’m a tad afraid that if I did reread the book, I’d find the scene and realize there was an obvious reason for it, but I was too stupid to figure it out. 

Having something THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT in your story may make your story memorable.  But it can also make the reader wonder why the writer is wasting their time with something that’s not important.  It’s an interesting trick, but one that should probably be used very rarely.

***

Image from Pixabay.

Five Sentence Stories

 

Over twenty years ago, a writing friend and I would email each other these short, five sentence stories.  I think one of us had read about some famous author using such short stories as a way to get the juices flowing.  It was a challenge and we saw it as a way to hone our skills.  Ultimately, I turned a couple of these exercises into longer short stories and I’ve had a few in some of my story collections.

A few years ago, I gathered four of these stories and posted them on a website.  Unfortunately, the other week when I randomly remembered these and went to reread them, I found the website was no longer around.  But I fortunately was able to find a copy of the post I had made, so these random writing exercises from over twenty years ago will see the light of day again.

***

It’s uncanny how at the most inconvenient times – for me at least – my neighbor will start having sex. Last week I was talking to my parents and his girl of the week started screaming unintelligible words.

“What is that?”

“Nothing mom.” It would probably be really annoying if he could last more than a couple of minutes.

***

While walking home one day, I saw a guy waiting at a bus stop look in my general direction and mutter something. I thought I heard him ask what the time was. I looked at my phone, but before telling him that it was 4:37, I asked, “Excuse me?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

A few seconds after I had passed him I realized how odd it would be if you were minding your own business and some stranger walked up to you, told you the time, and then continued on their way thinking they had done you a favor.

***

“Living Death”

Nick sat on the couch with the TV remote in his hand. Click, click, click. The talk show channel, the game show channel, the unbelievably bad movie channel all flicked across the screen. Click, click, click. The sound of his life passing by.

***

“Captain Belch verses Sir Sudorific, Part III”

When last we saw brave Captain Belch, he had just discovered that the villainous Sir Sudorific had captured the lovely Polly Precious and tied her to a keg of gunpowder.

“You’re too late Captain Belch; all I have to do is drop this torch and your Polly Precious will be gone forever.”

“Bleeeeeeeaaaaaaacch,” replied the Captain. Not only did the noxious fumes of his belch render Sir Sudorific unconscious, it also blew out the torch, thus saving Polly.

“My hero,” she said, as Captain Belch untied her and took her in his arms.

***

Image from Pixabay.

Short story – “Plans”

“Plans”

Around the beginning of October, Anna had decided that after years of erratic work, 2025 would be The Year of Finishing Her Novel.  Her plan had been to wait until the holiday madness had passed, before hunkering down to write her still untitled magnum opus.  But then in November that utterly deplorable … thing (Anna couldn’t bring herself to call it human) was elected. 

The normal joys of the season were replaced with the heavy bitterness knowing this could very well be “The Last Happy Christmas.” As such, Anna had barely written anything for two months.  But in the “Final Days of Sanity,” she steeled herself to get to work.  The first thing she needed to do was clean up her desktop.  Carol had often said that it looked like something had exploded in her computer, but Anna insisted the dozens of documents for Human Characters, Alien Characters, Technology, etc. were all laid out in a bizarrely organized fashion.  Although, if pressed, the only organization she could actually point to was that they were all there on the desktop.

But now she dragged all of those files into a new Novel folder, and moved it to the corner in hopes of better days.  Anna had to use her writing skills for the good of all, because now 2025 had to be The Year to Fight For Freedom.

Random Writing Tips – Rewriting the same story

 

Twenty some years ago, I bought a book – probably at a library book sale – of the collected short stories of this author.  I can’t remember which author it was, but I’m pretty sure he had been active back in the 50’s and 60’s, and I think I’d read a few of his novels, so he wasn’t a complete unknown to me. 

About halfway through the book, I’m reading a story and thinking, I’ve read this before.  At first I figured it had been in some other collection, but then I realized that no, it was this collection like ten stories ago.  I forget exactly what the stories were, but it was something like these aliens arrive on Earth and there’s some misunderstanding with the first humans they meet.  All the names were different, and like one was set in Iowa with these blue-skinned humanoids aliens while the other was set in Florida with these purple dog aliens.  But the basic story was the same.  And then, another ten stories or so later, there was a third version of the story.  I believe, the book had a listing of where all these stories had been published, and I’m pretty sure the three appeared in different magazines over a period of five or six years.

I don’t know how frequently this happens to other writers, but often I’ll have an idea and the plot comes to a fork.  Sometimes, after some thought it is obvious that one fork is better than the other, but sometimes both options are equally good.  So I’ve written two, or more, stories from the same initial idea, but I always made them different stories.  Like someone could read them and see similarities, but they’d never be confused thinking they had already read one of them. 

At first, when I saw this well-known author doing something that seemed a bit shady, I felt a little betrayed.  I don’t know if the guy was desperate for money and needed to make a sale so he just quickly rewrote something, or if there was some aspect of the story that really spoke to him so he wrote new versions of it every few years as his skill improved.  It’s hard to say. 

I bring all this up because the constant jumbling of stuff in my head randomly brought back this memory.  And I realized that painters often paint the same thing multiple times to get the best version.  The same for photographers, and film makers, and artists of all kinds.  So why not writers?  Why shouldn’t we write the same story over and over again, honing our craft and getting the best version? 

It’s something I hadn’t really thought about before.  But now I think I might look up some of my earliest stories and rewrite them.  Just to see what my, hopefully, better skill can make of them.

***

Image from Pixabay.

My writing plans for 2025

A couple months ago, I made a decision about my writing plans for 2025.  Part of my 2024 plans had been to post a story each month on my website, one each month on my Ko-fi profile, and one every other month on one of my blogs.  The ones on my website I would get the idea, write it, and post it that month, while the others were either new ones I could write in advance, or revised stories.  So that’s thirty stories, about half of which were new.  Turns out, between everything else going on in my life, meeting those goals took most of my writing energy and I barely had any to work on other projects.  So my plan had been to stop the monthly stories and just post stories on my blogs whenever I felt like it, and put all my focus on two big projects. 

The first project would be to finish up Lunar Dreams, which is a collection of essays I have on colonizing the moon.  I’ve been working on it for a year-and-a-half, but I’ll work on it for a month or so, and then decide to take it in a new direction.  Then I work on it for another month or so, and then decide to take it in a new-new direction.  And then after a couple of months, to take it in a revised-old-new direction.  But I think I’ve finally figured out where I’m going with it.  So I just need to hammer out a few details, and give it a good polish.  Once I finished that, then I would get around to finishing Volume One of The Pathfinder Saga.  This is two novellas and a short story.  The first novella I started … over ten years ago and is 90% done, but I originally wrote it to be a standalone story.  The second novella is 70% done, and I’ve barely started the short story.  I’ve tried working to update the first novella before, but my plan had been to work on it every Wednesday and Thursday and that didn’t turn out so well.  This is a fantasy story, and while I just “understand” scifi stuff like starships and hyperspace, I need to immerse myself in the story to keep how the magic works and what creatures can do what.  And just doing that a couple days a week wasn’t working.  My hope was by focusing on the setting for months at a time I’d finally finish it.

Then the election happened.  My plans had been made with the expectation that the country wouldn’t be driven off a cliff by lunatics.  Now I need to spend some of my writing energy fighting a fall into a fascist dystopia.

My current plan is to still write a story each month on my website.  Before, I’d come up with the story and write it that month, but I waived that self-imposed rule at the end of 2024, so I’m doing away with it entirely.  This is helpful, because as I type this up at the end of December, I already have the January and February stories mostly finished.  I just need to give them a good polish.  I also have another story where I already have the framework, I just need to fill it all out, which I’m having a bit of trouble with.  This was to be the January story, but now I’ll have a few more months to work on it.  In the past, some of these Monthly Stories had been of a political or social nature, but I’d also throw in some fun ones.  But going forward, they will probably all be of a political or social nature. 

As to Ko-fi, I’m keeping my account, but I’m not planning on posting much there.  The point of posting a story every month was to try to get some traction to maybe start making money there, but that didn’t happen.  Maybe in the future, we’ll see.

I also plan on posting a story each month on one of my blogs.  These will likely be revised stories, or maybe some new fun ones. 

In 2024 I posted over thirty stories and was a bit burned out.  I had planned on only posting a couple while “relaxing” working on my big projects.  And now I’m planning on posting at least twenty-four stories, finishing Lunar Dreams and making some headway on The Pathfinder Saga, while hoping the country doesn’t collapse.  I have the sinking suspicion that 2025 will end with me even more burned out.