In
the past three months I’ve republished 3 of my stories. They are: “Rest in Peace,” “In the Victor’s Footsteps,” and “Memories.”
I also published the short story “A Christmas Miracle?”
Things
are a bit less hectic, and I have managed to do some more writing. Not as much as I want, but more is better.
I
think the only news item is that yesterday I posted my writing goals for 2022.
***
Image
from Pixabay.
Well,
I didn’t meet any of my writing goals for 2021.
I think the main reason being I had too many other things taking up my
time, from work to helping my parents around the house and farm. Will 2022 be different? We’ll just have to wait and see.
My
main goal for 2021 was to finish The
Uncapped Pen: a collection of fifty stories covering various aspects of
writing from author’s arguing with their muse to the antics at writing group meetings. While I did finish several stories for it and
polish up several more, I still have a ways to go to finish it. I’m giving myself the deadline of July to
finish it up and publish it. Stay tuned
for that.
I
also wanted to finish some stories to submit to various magazines. And I do have one that I’m almost ready to
send out. Hopefully I can finish up a
few more.
I
wanted to work on The Pathfinder Saga:
Volume 1, which is the start of this massive fantasy story, but I don’t think
I’ve done anything with that since about March.
Instead of trying to do too many things at once, I think I’ll hold off
on it until I finish The Uncapped Pen.
Hopefully,
2022 will be better than 2021, but you’ll have to come back next year to see
how I did.
***
Image
from Pixabay.
I have a lot of ideas for stories. Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all. I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them. I’ll just never get a chance to. So, I give them to the world. If you can make something of these, go right ahead. And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.
These
are just some quick ideas that could be turned into TV shows.
First
Idea – Fantasy cop show
I
believe I was watching a not so great movie when this cliché scene
happened. Basically, the bad guy killed
the good cop’s wife, or kid, I can’t remember, and the good cop catches up to
them and starts beating the crap out of them.
Then his partner shows up and stops them saying something along the
lines of, “Killing them won’t bring her back.” But then I thought, what if it
could?
The
idea is that in a present day world with magic, if someone is murdered they
don’t bury the body right away. They put
some special two-part bracelet, or something, on the body and then store
it. If they catch the murderer, they put
one of the bracelet parts on them and then execute them with a special
spell. The murderer dies, but their
lifeforce resurrects their victim. And
in a world with such magic, they also have truth serum, so they know for
certain who all this person murdered and they can bring all their victims back. If the murderer dies before they can be found,
the bracelets disintegrate and they bury the body like normal.
The
story begins with them executing someone – who confessed with truth serum – but
instead of resurrecting the victim the victim’s body explodes because they
executed the wrong person. This causes
concern. In the original version, the
magic world was secret and separate from the real world, and a magic detective
gets the help of a regular detective to find out how to get around all the
magic. And along the way they discover
some dark plot, and probably have a romance.
But
that seemed too … normal. So the revised
version is that the world is all magic, but the cop goes to a “fantasy” writer
– which in this world would be someone who wrote stories about worlds where
magic doesn’t exist – to help solve the case.
Second
Idea – Superhero comedy
This
started with a post on Facebook asking how you would explain to the insurance
agency if the Hulk smashed your car.
After hammering some ideas out, I came up with this comedy. In this world, there are two big cities each
with their own batches of superheroes and supervillains. They are a hundred or so miles apart, and
practically in-between them is this small town of maybe a hundred people: Main
Street is basically just one block. On
this block there is a small law office, an insurance agency, a hair salon, a
pizza joint, and a couple other things.
The stories would be about these regular people living in such a strange
world, like the roof of the hair salon was damaged by some villains battle
drone, but the insurance company is being a pain about getting it fixed.
Every
time one of the supervillains tries to expand their territory to the next city,
they basically go through, over, or under this town. And then all the superheroes follow. Maybe the speedster in this world has an
understanding with the pizza joint to keep a pizza on a certain shelf in the
refrigerator for them. When the
speedster has to run to the other city – maybe once a week or so – they make a
quick stop to grab the pizza and leave a $20.
They then use their “friction power” or whatever to reheat it.
I
was thinking one of the storylines would be this “crazy” guy who blames
everything on supervillains. He gets a
flat tire and goes into the insurance agency with some outlandish story to try
to collect from the fund set up to pay for all the damage done by
supervillains. The twist would be that
while 99% of his claims are just delusions, he’s actually right about
some.
Another
possible storyline would be a very minor villain would be sent to work
undercover at the pizza shop. Meanwhile,
a very minor hero would be sent to work undercover at the law office, or
wherever. The two start dating, not
knowing they’re working against each other.
And maybe to do something different, the hero joins the dark side for
love.
Third
Idea – Fantasy show
The
show would begin with a ten year old kid getting out of a city school with his
friends. They start walking along, but
then he gets an odd feeling and looks across the street. There he sees a woman who smiles at him, but
then turns and leaves.
Fifteen
or so years later, he’s in a bar when the same woman walks up to him. But this time he’s too drunk to get any odd
feelings. She asks if he wants to go
outside, and he agrees. They step into
an alley and he starts to undo his belt, but she stabs him.
He
dies, but then gets back up, instantly sober.
He asks what the hell, and she starts to explain that he’s an
immortal. Immortals can sense one
another, but they are very few. In olden
days, it was likely an immortal would “die” long before they met another. But nowadays, it’s really easy for an
immortal to go around standing before schools to see if any of the kids are
immortals. That’s the woman’s job. She found him, and just waited until he was
an adult to “kill” him. This stops him
from aging, as well as being a very effective way of showing that he is an
immortal.
Immortals
can really die, but it takes something like being drawn and quartered. Which was actually a method used by immortals
to execute some of their members in the past, but then normal humans found out
about it and thought it really cool.
With
the current population, there’s maybe an immortal born every year. This has led to some issues in the immortal
community. Most immortals are content to
amass some wealth and then live comfortably in the shadows, which has worked
for centuries. But as there are more
immortals in the world, and it’s becoming harder to live in the shadows, a
second faction has emerged that think they should rule over normal humans. That leader may have been someone who was repeatedly
burned at the stake, so they have a dim view of normal humans. The two groups are more like political
parties than warring factions. The idea
would be that neither side is fully correct, but that each have their pros and
cons.
The
woman works for the first group, and the story would be her bringing the guy
into their world. Part of her job is
finding new immortals, but she also works to try to bring immortals from the
other side over. So it’s a world full of
spies and secret agents.
Fourth
Idea – A companion show to the third idea
Basically,
this show would cover the same time period and many of the same events, but
from the POV of the other group of immortals.
Each show would be self-contained, and show their side as the right
ones, but you’d get a clearer picture if you watched both.
The
idea I had would be the main character of this show would be an agent who keeps
tabs on the woman immortal in the other show.
Like, he was on the roof of the building across the street watching her
stab the newbie in the alley. Maybe they
were a couple two hundred years ago, but it didn’t end well.
If
you have difficulty writing rousing speeches – which is a skill few have – it’s
probably best to not write a story that requires one. I watched something recently – I won’t say
what – but there was a point where the bad guys were winning and the good guys
needed a big, motivating speech. So the
hero stepped up and, said some words.
The good guys got fired up and went on to win the day, but in the real
world I sat there going, “What?” because after five seconds I had forgotten
what they said. This ultra-pivotal
speech sounded like something a student would say at a high school
graduation. Not to dismiss outright the
difficulties faced by youths, but hearing some eighteen year old talking about
life’s hardships doesn’t resonate with someone who wakes up each morning
wondering which random part of them will hurt today for an unknown reason.
This
big hero speech seemed like they wrote an outline of what they wanted the
speech to be about, and they just never got around to writing it so they just
read the outline. And the characters in
universe acted like it was a “We shall never surrender,” type of thing. Which broke whatever immersion I had in the
story.
***
Image
from Pixabay.
As the year draws to a close, it’s as good a time as any to do some cleaning. Do you have twenty blog posts you started but never finished? Go through them and see if there are any you can salvage for next year. Did you start to organize your writing notebooks? Why not finish doing that. Did you start to follow everyone on Twitter who follows your favorite author? That’s probably more of a long term project that’s outside the scope of what I’m talking about.
A
lot people focus on putting words on pages when they talk about writing. While that is important, there are a thousand
minor things related to writing that are often overlooked. And these overlooked minor details can often be
used as an excuse for not writing. So if
you do them now, you’ll have to find new excuses.
