Free story idea – Star Jumping

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.

Here in the real world, you can’t accelerate a mass up to the speed of light.  The closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need, and it quickly becomes outrageous.  Thanks Einstein.  But what if you could … negate the mass, or cover it up somehow?  That’s a key element in this story.  I don’t know exactly how it would work – you would need to come up with the basics at least for this made-up physics – but the idea is you build a ship with some device that creates a bubble, or field around the ship.  This makes the ship nearly massless for the tiniest split of a second.  During this time, you fire a laser pulse at the ship.  Now, one of the whacky bits of Relativity is that time – to an outside observer – runs “slow” for things moving near light speed.  So this ship – while nearly massless – when hit by the laser pulse, would fly off at near light speed.  The tiniest split second later, as viewed by the ship, the bubble or whatever would collapse and the ship would regain its mass and screech to a halt.  Hopefully slow enough so that the passenger isn’t smeared into a red paste along the backwall.  To the passenger, it would seem they traveled lightyears in less than a second.  But to an observer back at the laser, years may have passed.  The laser would fire, then eight years later you’d get the message from the ship that they traveled four light years: four years for the outward journey and four years for the message to come back.  I’m sure physics people are banging their heads wanting to explain why all of that is wrong.  As if warp drives and lightspeed engines make any sense.

Anyway, this story follows a star jump test program.  The first issue is how long do you set this bubble or whatever to exist, and how do you fire the laser pulse at the right time.  So basically, you build a robotic probe, call it Interstellar A, and it turns on the bubble, you fire the laser, and two years later you get the message that it traveled one lightyear.  So you do a few more test runs with probes Interstellar B through F to fine tune things, over a couple decades. 

But now they’re ready to send the first human to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.  The plan is once the Interstellar G mission – with an astronaut and the human-level AI that runs the ship – arrive at Proxima Centauri, they’ll set up a robotic miner on some asteroid.  Over a year or so, it will mine needed materials to build a laser system.  It will also mine materials to build a shield for the craft because space is only nearly empty.  Hitting a dust grain while traveling near the speed of light would cause some damage, so the shield the craft had when it left Earth is very damaged and needs to be replaced.

While all that is happening, the astronaut will explore the system.  The ship isn’t designed to land, so it can only orbit any planet and drop probes.  Some of these probes will return with samples, either just rock samples or maybe some lifeforms, if there are any.  Once the laser is built, the plan is for the astronaut to use it to come back to our solar system with their samples.

I image the story will be beautiful descriptions of alien planets along with long conversations between the human and the AI on the meaning of life, and exploration, and whatever to pass the time.  Along the way, the human will point out that they really don’t want to go back to Earth, they’d much rather keep exploring.  I forget who it was, but I read years ago there was some American pioneer who if they could see smoke from somebody’s cabin, it meant they were too close to civilization and they had to move further west.  This astronaut – with their AI companion – would rather just keep exploring further and further out into the galaxy. 

Fortunately, Interstellar F finally shows up.  While this probe was launched sooner, it wasn’t fine-tuned enough and so only made it 99.9999% of the way to Proxima Centauri.  But, it then fired up its engine and over however many years finally inched its way to the system.  So they load Interstellar F up with the samples, give it a new shield, and fire it back to Earth.  They then build another shield for Interstellar G, and fire it off to the next nearest star system.  They don’t use it to go to the main Alpha Centauri system, because there’s probably already a mission on its way there.  Not to mention, Proxima Centauri will probably soon be crawling with scientists who will also take the short jump to Alpha Centauri.  And our main characters would rather be elsewhere.

They don’t plan to disappear.  At each new star system, they’ll mine resources to build a new laser system to move on, but which later explorers can also use.  They also stockpile samples, and materials for shields.  They also write detailed reports on all they find and beam them back to Earth, and the other star systems they’ve been to, and explain where they are going next. 

But that’s their plan at the end of the story.  As I said, I expect the main focus of the book would be these long discussions about what it means to be a pioneer.  Which, I would find interesting, but I doubt I could write.  So hopefully, someone else will.

Free story idea – Two spooky ideas

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.

For this spooky month, I have two ideas: one for a movie – maybe a series of movies – and one for a … are they still TV shows if people stream them on a computer?

Horror Movie Idea

Whether this is an October or January horror movie will depend on the budget, acting, script, etc. 

A group of white college kids from, let’s say California, go camping somewhere in the southwest.  Something happens and some monster comes after them.  It tells them it is named Bugee, or something, and it will kill them off one by one each day.  Once they finish panicking, they do a search for Bugee, and find that it’s a Navajo boogey man that can only be defeated by the sound of a rattlesnake rattling.  So they go off to find a snake, one of them gets bit, but they have one when Bugee comes back.  One guy holds the snake up to rattle, but Bugee just laughs and kills the guy.

The group takes the bit one to a hospital, where the doctor turns out to be Navajo.  They ask why the rattlesnake didn’t work on Bugee, and the doctor has no clue what they are talking about.  They show them the webpage on Bugee, and the doctor reads it and goes, “This is bullshit, it has nothing to do with our culture.”

Turns out, the entity currently going by Bugee is just some demon that likes fucking with people.  Centuries ago it was terrorizing people as a giant wolf, but then someone shot it with a silver bullet, and it pretended that killed it, just so for centuries it could laugh as people tried to kill it with silver bullets which do nothing.  As to the rattlesnake, long ago it was attacking some of the first white people in the area, and there just happened to be a rattlesnake nearby, and it pretended that the sound of the rattle drove it off.  The survivors tell the tale, and after a few rounds of racist telephone, it gets written down and many years later ends up on the internet. 

All of this can either be shown in flashback, or maybe Bugee tells the last surviving woman that if she, I don’t know, has sex with her dead friend, it will explain how it can be stopped.  She, reluctantly has sex, to be scarred for the rest of her life, and Bugee explains that nothing humans can do can stop it.  It then laughs and leaves.  The End.

And this could be a franchise.  All you have to do is get a new group of people, and find fun ways for Bugee to fuck with them.  You could even have prequels of Bugee fucking with Huns, or Romans, or hell, Neanderthals.  You have to admit, that would be a fucking weird movie.  Probably the only thing to keep in mind, is there shouldn’t be any continuing characters.  Or if that last woman does run into Bugee decades later, it just kills her without hesitation. 

Horror Series Idea?

For historical reasons, I see this series set in France.  I’m sure it could easily be set in other parts of the world, but I know European history better than other parts of the world.

The first episode starts with a guy in say, 1830, riding a horse across France.  He’s trying to get to some place, but makes a wrong turn.  As the sun is about to set, he comes across a small village.  He stops at the first house to ask where he is and if he could stay the night.  A man opens the door, and starts yelling.  The wife and kids also start screaming, and then the man grabs a fire poker or something and beats the Traveler to death.

Cut to the Traveler waking up, in a crypt.  He freaks out a bit, but crawls out.  There are several other people there, including one who looks like the guy who beat him to death, only several decades older.  Some of the people greet each other like old friends, and then one asks the Traveler his name.  The guy gives it, and then wants to know what is going on.  One, maybe the Mayor, says it’s a long story, and to come with them.  They go outside, and there’s this weird, metal carriage that doesn’t need a horse. 

The Mayor takes the Traveler through the village which has several damaged and burned houses to a less damaged house, and after some food, he explains the history of the village.  Long ago, there was a Witch, who as she was being burned, cursed the village to always have the same population at sundown.  Meaning, if someone shows up right before sundown, then somebody at random in the village would have just fallen over dead.  It might be the Traveler, the wife of the house he stopped at, the two-year-old next door, all had an equal chance of just dying.  Which means, there are no guests in the village.  And if a child is born, they’ll have already worked out who will leave the village, usually to live in the smaller village just outside of the cursed area.

But the curse also works the other way.  If somebody dies, and it’s early enough in the day, they’ll bring someone from the smaller village back.  But if somebody falls down the stairs and breaks their neck just before sunset, then someone in the graveyard will come back to life, healed of whatever killed them.  At first, people would be resurrected only to die trying to dig out of their coffins, so they started just putting people in an easy to access crypt.  The reason so many came back today, is that it’s the middle of WWII, and a stray bomb killed ten members of an extended family.  Although, once the sun sets, one of them comes back.  This is Lady.

There’s a lot of stuff that can be done with this.  Like, maybe the Mayor’s “grandmother” is actually his so many times great-grandmother.  Maybe, she died back in 1720, but was resurrected in 1845 and lived another thirty years, only to die and be resurrected a second time.  The cancer or whatever killed her has been cured, but she’s still someone with a 120 year-old-body. 

What the town is really waiting for is some specific person to be resurrected because they’re the one who buried the Witch – outside the village – but never told anyone where.  The villagers assume the only way to break the curse is to find her body, hope she is resurrected, and then lift the curse. 

The Traveler is very confused by all of this, meaning we the audience can follow along as he slowly comes to grips with everything.  Like maybe the next day some Nazi soldiers show up to check out the bomb damage, and the Traveler has to be hidden because he doesn’t have any papers, and all the villagers know to keep the secret, but can they trust this outsider? 

If they don’t trust him, then why did they bury him in the village to be resurrected?  Well, maybe there was some disagreement about it at the time, but the guy who killed him felt bad.  And since they were both resurrected, he and the Traveler build an odd friendship.  Like, maybe the Traveler was a poet, and the guy found his book of poems and really enjoyed them, and started writing poetry himself.  So they end up with stuff to talk about.

Another storyline could be the slow building of a relationship between the Traveler and Lady.  Maybe the Mayor is putting her and Traveler up in his house since so many houses have been damaged.  And she’s teaching him all that’s happened in the past century.  At first, he’s put off by this “modern” woman, but he slowly comes around.  Hopefully, whoever ends up writing this doesn’t do some cliched bullshit of “she looks just like the woman he was going to marry back in 1830.” One … I don’t know if it’s an issue, but it’s a thing, about Lady is that she’s secretly happy her husband and his family are dead, because he abused her and they treated her like shit.  Death parted them, and she might not see any of them in her new, second life. 

As I see it, there are basically three ways the series could go.  The first is it just keeps going.  Once you get all the weird stuff out of the way, it just becomes what happens in a small French village for the last few years of WWII.  And on occasion someone dead comes back to life.  The second would have the one who buried the Witch finally resurrect, like that’s how they end the first season.  And season two is trying to find where he buried her.  Like, “I buried her under that really big tree,” doesn’t mean much after three or four hundred years.  And then the third season would be they find the Witch, and cart all the bodies out of the crypt and someone stands outside the village, so she has to be the one who resurrects.  And then they try to convince her to lift the curse. 

The second way would be okay, except that’s a pretty standard way to do such a series.  The first way could be fine, except we know network executives would want to add more, like, what if there are now werewolves, or something.  They’d take an interesting idea, but so much crap would be added to it to keep it going, it would become mostly crap.  So my preference would be a third way, which is basically just two, maybe three seasons of exploring the weirdness of this situation, and then ending.  Nothing is resolved, but we’re left knowing the weirdness just continues.  Maybe, it could end with the Traveler and Lady getting married, so there’s a bit of a happy note.

Free story idea – A Star Wars Story

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.

About a week after I post this, will be May the Fourth.  So I figured now would be as good a time as any to tell the idea I had for a Star Wars series.

I don’t know if this would work as just a ten-episode miniseries, or a regular show with two or maybe three seasons.  Three seasons would probably be pushing it.  You could do more, shoehorning in other stuff from the movies and shows, but I think this show works best focused on this one town over the course of a year or two at most.

So where’s this town?  I figure it’s on a planet that looks a lot like the American Southwest.  Cacti would probably be too distinctive, so someplace with some indeterminate scrub, so it’s not just a straight up desert with sand.  Why is this town here?  There’s a mine.  What’s mined?  Some material used in some blaster component.  Like, this is the fifth largest mine in the quadrant for this mineral or crystal or whatever.  Important for the Empire, but not overly critical.

The population of this town is mostly human, but there are plenty of other races there.  The mining is probably done by criminals, with the safer processing done by locals.  There is a Stormtrooper garrison to watch over everything.  And there are the townspeople who do other things, like supply food to the mine and garrison, run bars, etc.  And in the town there is a small Rebel cell wanting to either disrupt the supplies or steal them for the Cause, as well as various criminal organizations who would like to steal stuff for themselves.

The first episode would introduce most of the main cast.  There would be Joe Stormtrooper who isn’t disillusioned with the Empire, yet, but can’t wait to leave.  Part of it is because his boss is a real asshole who screwed up somehow and was sent someplace where he wouldn’t be a problem but is determined to find some way back into the Emperor’s good graces.  Another reason Joe is getting tired of his job is because he has a girlfriend, uh, Jane, who’s a town local.  She might run one of the bars that is popular with off duty Stormtroopers.  Jane is sympathetic towards the Rebellion, but she likes Joe.  Her brother, Bob, unknown to her, is actually part of the Rebellion.  He runs a small freighter ship taking supplies to this other planet in the solar system, and he’s started smuggling some supplies or agents for the Rebellion.  The main Rebellion Cell in town, run by Lady, is only about 80% certain of his loyalties, and so is still testing him with some small missions to make sure he’s really on their side.  And Lady’s job right now is tough, because they had made plans for this operation that would destroy a large supply of this mineral, but then word came from higher up that they should steal it.  Which not only is an entirely different type of mission, but it also puts them up against some of the criminal gangs.

So the first episode shows Joe walking his beat, maybe stopping in at the bar and sharing a discreet word with Jane, before going back to the barracks to hear the latest rant/scheme from his boss.  And then we see Lady dealing with one of her lieutenants who just hates the Empire and wants to blow everything up, regardless of their orders, and then she goes to a meeting with a criminal gang who will help stealing this shipment if the Rebellion looks the other way as they make moves into the mine itself.  All kinds of stuff is going on, but the episode ends with word arriving that the Emperor has been killed when the Second Death Star was destroyed.

What does this mean for this town?  Well, I always assumed that the chain of command went from the Emperor to Darth Vader to a vast gap to various admirals or whatever, and that after the Emperor and Vader died, the Empire fractured as all these admirals decided that they should be the new one in charge.  So you end up with like a twenty-sided civil war.  What’s important in a civil war?  Blasters.  And the fifth largest mine in the quadrant for this mineral has become the largest supply of it in Admiral Dude’s area, so it is of vital importance that he secures it at all cost.

Episode two starts with everyone not sure what to do.  Maybe Joe sees someone with a Rebellion flag, and he just shrugs and walks away because does it mean anything anymore.  He might even be planning on just leaving and going to be with Jane, when Admiral Dude’s forces show up.  Joe’s boss is livid that this admiral is overstepping his bounds and will certainly face the wrath of the Emperor, but Dude says the boss is unfit to command and has him executed.  He may even have some of the Stormtroopers that left rounded up and either executed or put to work in the mines.  So it was lucky for Joe that he hesitated.

At first, Lady and the other Rebellion people are overjoyed that they’ve toppled the Emperor, and they expect the townspeople to cheer them.  But then another thousand Stormtroopers show up with a new tyrant wanting to use their town as the source of the weapons to build his new Empire.  So the townspeople are pissed off at the Rebellion for making their lives worse.

And that’s pretty much all I had figured out.  There would be no Jedi, and only mentions of great space battles.  The show would focus on the turbulent time after the death of the Emperor.  Which, there is plenty of material there for some high-quality drama.

Free story idea – The Chronicles of Alif

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.

This idea began when I read some Conan the Barbarian stories.  And the original idea was for a, sort of biblical Conan I named Alif.  By that I mean a holy book collecting the stories of this hero fighting monsters and whatnot who eventually forms a kingdom and is declared a living god.  But as I thought of it, that seemed a bit much, so I toned it down a bit.  The current idea was when this monster fighting hero eventually reclaims the throne that was stolen from him, some flunkies take all the stories told about him and collect them together into two or three books, split into various parts of his life.  Some stories faithfully depict what happened, some bend over backwards to show the glory of the new king and the evilness of the usurpers, and many of them are contradictory. 

Part 1 of the collection tells the tale of how Alif’s father the King was killed and his throne stolen.  The idea was that his first wife and son died in childbirth.  His second wife was four months pregnant but died of some fever.  His third wife bore a daughter, but they both drowned a few months later when their boat capsized.  So the people start thinking that the King and his bloodline are cursed, and some generals and ministers start moving to make a claim to the throne. 

Shortly after the King was born, another boy was born in the palace and the two were raised together and became friends.  The King trusted his Friend completely, and with his help they defeated those that were making moves on the throne.  Now this Friend had triplet sons, and he wanted the throne, but he was being slow and cautious about doing it.

Now at some point, the King took a concubine who became pregnant.  Perhaps he had gone to some oracle (or maybe a Witch) that said no son of his born in the palace would become King, so the King sent the concubine off somewhere to give birth in secret.  To satisfy the oracle, as well as to hide her from the usurpers the King was sure were still in the palace.  She gives birth to Alif, and comes back to the palace to let everyone know the King does have an heir. 

The Friend isn’t happy about this, so he and his sons start massacring everyone in the palace.  The King is killed, all his faithful servants, etc.  The concubine hands Alif off to a wetnurse who has another baby with her, and tells them to go through the secret passage to the river.  The concubine will try to hold the men off.  But before the wetnurse can get away, one of the sons shoots her with an arrow.  The arrow goes through her body and kills the other baby, but she manages to get to the river and sets Alif off in a barrel, or something.  And then she dies.  The concubine has also been killed, and the sons recover the dead baby and assume it is Alif. 

How much of that actually happened, we don’t know.  There aren’t that many survivors from the palace to tell the story, and if you’re collecting stories of the rightful King reclaiming their throne, you want to make sure the usurpers are bad, as in they’ll betray their king and kill unarmed women and babies.  In the later parts with stories of Alif growing up and heroing, we can find out that the three brothers first turned on their father, and then on each other.  Until the brother that killed the baby, ends up as the last usurper king that Alif eventually kills.  Possibly with the help of that king’s daughter, who Alif marries. 

But before all that, Part 2 deals with a young Alif living on a raft with a Witch.  There is a big river flowing by the palace, and there is a lot of cargo going up and down it.  The Witch’s raft is unique because it goes upriver by magic.  She is an interesting character because there is a prophecy that she can only be killed by someone who knows her name.  So she killed off everyone she could find who knew her name, and it has been like 200 years, so she might be immortal.  Other parts of the prophecy might be that she can only be killed on land – which is why she’s stayed in boats for the past century – and something like she’ll lose her magic if she doesn’t have a pet, so she has a couple dozen cats, and dogs, and birds, and whatever.  Alif is just the latest in a long line of orphans she brings onboard to look after them all. 

I think the story is just that she found this baby in a barrel, or whatever, and took them in without thinking much about it.  But one day she notices something odd about him and reads his fortune and is blown away by what she sees.  She doesn’t tell him what she suspects, but she does send him to some school to learn how to fight.  Not as a gladiator, but more as hired muscle.  This is a tad confusing, because she rarely needs hired muscle.  She won’t turn down shady work, but most of her business is just transporting cargo up and down the river.

Part 3 deals with Alif at the fighter school.  Of course, to our modern views, the school is terrible.  The teachers are cruel and all the older, bigger students are expected to bully the younger, smaller ones.  And Alif is small for his age.  But Alif is quick witted, and starts outsmarting the bullies and teachers.  He may even form a band of some of the smaller students.  He quickly learns fighting and weapons, and adds muscle, but not much.  I’d say he’s more John Wick than Conan. 

Part 4 is when he’s learned all he can from the school and returns to the Witch.  This is when she explains who she suspects he is.  Knowing that he can’t just go to the palace and reclaim his throne, Alif decides it’s best for him to start making a name for himself.  So he sets out to fight monsters and outlaws.  Along the way he rejoins with some of the friends from the school, and he makes new friends. 

I imagine these stories would be the bulk of the collection.  Like, Part 4 can be all the early stories, but then Part 5 will be his adventures in the neighboring kingdom to the north, while Part 6 will be the adventures in the kingdom to the south.  I also imagine most of these stories won’t be accurate to what really happened.  Like, maybe there was an eclipse, and it shows up in two or three stories which are all set hundreds of miles apart.  Or, a lot of these stories are of the type where Alif just shows up in a village – for some reason leaving behind his band of ten guys he always travels with – and defeats the minor monster terrorizing the village, then leaves.  Did it actually happen, or did some enterprising town whip together a monster story and how the great hero Alif defeated it to part some coins from any gullible travelers?  And was the story just gathered in a big sweep of Alif stories for the collection without checking any details?

I figure all of these parts will contain a few short stories loosely connected.  But I think the penultimate Part will be one long story, which will be where he and his band set off on some grand quest.  Maybe stories of his deeds have spread and a king in some far-off land has called him to slay a dragon, or something. 

The final Part, is him returning home and deciding that now is the time to retake his throne.  So he goes and challenges the final usurper king, who probably cheats, maybe with a poisoned blade.  But instead of killing Alif, the king chains him up in a dungeon.  The reason is he is a huge fan of this hero Alif, and he wants to hear all of the stories.  Also, having this defeated, legendary hero chained up in the basement is a bit of a status symbol of badass villainy.  But once he hears all the stories, and the people have forgotten about Alif, the King will just kill him.  During all of this the usurper king’s daughter falls for Alif, and helps him regain his strength.  Maybe she supplies him with the antidote to whatever poison her father uses.  He breaks free, kills the usurper, regains his throne, and marries the daughter. 

And I guess there could be more story collections of what happens with King Alif, but I haven’t thought of anything.  But I suspect he’d be a king more concerned with fighting monsters than dealing with a budget, so I imagine there’d be a few palace coup attempts.  Of course, all of that requires someone to write all the stories leading up to his becoming King.  So if you like this idea, get to work on it.  Or, better yet, get a group of people to write all the stories.  That way all the stories will have different voices, which will help sell the idea it’s not just one person making up everything.

Free story idea – For Black History Month

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.

I don’t really have a title for this idea.  It’s an idea I had just in early January.  I was still playing with it when I went, “Oh, if I make the main character black that could … mean I probably shouldn’t be writing this idea.” As a white guy I know some things about racism in the US over the past century, but I haven’t lived it which is probably necessary for this story to really hit home.  Also, if any of the plot points I’ve come up with dealing with racism are factually wrong, it’s just my ignorance. 

I don’t have any names figured out, so just for simplicity I’ll call the characters Grandfather, Father, Son, and Brother.  Son being the main character born in the summer of 1941 somewhere in the deep South.  Just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Grandfather starts pressuring Father to join the military.  His reasoning is if the white folk see black folk fighting for the country, that will surely weaken racism.  At the time Grandfather is in his early forties, and would join himself but he has a limp or something.  At first Father doesn’t want to because it’s war, but also he has a wife and six month old to take care of.  But he eventually does volunteer.  And nine months after he ships out, Brother is born.

Now, as a black man fighting in World War II, the clichéd – and tad racist – idea would be to make Father a Tuskegee Airman.  But in this story, he spends most of the war doing the logistically vital job of unloading ships in Italy.  I’m not sure where black units served, but that seems likely.

As the war in Europe is winding down, or maybe just after it finishes, Father receives word that his wife has died.  She was hit by a car, which didn’t stop.  And while she was only a block or so from a hospital, it was a White’s Only hospital.  She bled to death while a Good Samaritan was trying to get her to a black hospital on the other side of town.  And when Father returns home, he finds his service made no impact on the racism he faces.  So he becomes rather bitter and disillusioned with everything. 

That’s the backstory.  The main story starts in 1958 when Son is seventeen.  In 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, and the space race was on.  Son is optimistic for this new age, maybe even fantasizing of going off to fight Space Nazis.  Some of this is from his Grandfather, who still holds out hope we can all live together.  Father is still bitter, and has possibly become an alcoholic.

One day, Son is walking down the street, when there is a bright flash, some pain, and he ends up in this blasted area with odd equipment scattered everywhere.  There are a couple of people there, and at first they talk to him in an unknown language, but then they switch to this terrible Shakespearean style of English.

The story, Son eventually figures out, is that about 500 years from now, these aliens attack Earth with a sucker punch that kills most people and forces the survivors to flee.  And for the next 500 years, the survivors fight a losing guerrilla war against these aliens.  Along the way, they come across the remains of several other alien races the bad aliens have exterminated.  One of them was working on a time machine that they had about 90% complete.  The humans gather everything and spend a few decades finishing it. 

They sneak back to the wastes of Earth, and set up the machine.  Their plan is to send someone a thousand or so years into the past with knowledge of advanced technology.  They’d start spreading this out to jump start our technology, so hopefully we’d be better able to defend ourselves when the aliens show up.  They sent the test subject back, but unfortunately, it was just where Son was and he got sucked into the future and the system overloaded and the time machine blew up.

So Son gets to live his fantasy of fighting space Nazis, which he quickly learns isn’t great.  And even with some benefits – he has new genes he can … inject into the somewhat shallow gene pool – he does want to return home.  He also learns that the person they sent back was a black man, which probably didn’t go over well.  And he has to explain why.  After five centuries of progress, then an attack which destroyed or made the survivors leave behind 99.9999% of historical records, and then five more centuries of bleak survival, the people in the future have absolutely no idea what life was like in the Twentieth Century.  One of the few things that survived is Shakespeare, which is what they figure people in the past talked like.  To them, the concept of racism is so bizarre they figure Son must be pranking them. 

It takes a few years to gather the parts and remake the time machine.  In that time Son teaches them the technology of his time, so they give him some things that would probably be developed in a few decades.  Unfortunately, since the first machine was destroyed, they don’t have the precise numbers, but they think they can get him back to roughly the right time.

Son is sent back, and ends up on the side of the road about now.  A case could be made that he showed up around the time George Floyd was murdered, but I leave that to anyone who writes this story.  It might be raining, or just about to, when a truck driven by a white guy pulls over and asks where Son is going.  As a 1950’s black kid, Son replies, “I’m just heading to the library, Sir.” But then he’s surprised when the man tells him to hop in and he’ll give him a ride.  Now the driver, seeing a young man who calls people Sir, figures Son must have been in the military.  He asks where he served, and Son just muddles through saying he helped unload ships.  And the man thanks him for his service. 

Son tries to hide his confusion when the man drops him off at what – in the 1950’s – was the white library.  But he sees white and black people going in, so he goes in.  This is where he meets Girlfriend.  Her story is that she works at the library part time while she goes to college.  The reason she is there is because you need someone to believe that he traveled from the past to the future and back to now to explain to him how the internet works or who Obama is, without just writing him off as a crazy person.  At first she thinks he is a crazy guy, but then he shows her the technology he brought back, which I’m not sure what exactly it is, but it’s a different way of doing something we already have.

Anyway, once Girlfriend is convinced of Son’s story, she helps him find out about his family.  Grandfather and Father are both dead, but Brother is still alive in a retirement home.  They go to visit him, and learn what happened when Son left.  That same day, this weird black guy tried talking to some white woman about some random technology, which caused an incident and the man ended up being lynched.  His family figured Son somehow got caught up in it all and was lost in a ditch somewhere. 

And that’s all I have.  This idea just started as someone from the 1950’s seeing the bleak future, and then ending up in this time.  I wasn’t sure what else to do with it, but then when I thought about making the main character black, it opened up a lot of possibilities.  We can see 1950’s racism, a world where – through time and tragedy – racism has been forgotten, and the racism of today.  For example, I left open the race of Girlfriend.  Maybe she’s third generation Hispanic still being accused of being in the country illegally, or maybe she’s Korean and some accuse her of releasing Covid.  There is the potential for a lot of meat to this story.  Hopefully, somebody writes it.

Free story idea – Lost wallet

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.

To start, I don’t really have a title for this story.  For my records I labeled it “Lost Wallet” for reasons which will be explained.  The idea as I have it would work as a novella, but if you can think of more material to add it could be a novel, or even a series. 

There are over a hundred spacefaring civilizations around the galaxy.  They fall into basically four groups.  There are the ones that have been around for tens or hundreds of thousands of years and have technology that basically make them gods.  They are around, but nobody really knows what they are doing and they play no part in the story.  The second group – of a dozen or so species – have been around for maybe ten thousand years and are extremely powerful.  They are well on their way to being in the god tier, and the lesser species just hope not to be noticed by them.  The third group have only been around for a few thousand years, and are still figuring out the galaxy.  There are fifty or so species in this group.  They are the main movers and shakers in the galaxy.  There are trading stations every few hundred lightyears all over the galaxy – some have been around for thousands of years and nobody really knows who first built them – and most of the business done on them is handled by this third group.  And the fourth group are the newbies, and they are another fifty or so species.  They know of the larger picture in the galaxy, but they usually stay within tens of lightyears from their homeworld.  They maybe stick with just one or two of these trading stations.

Humans, are sort of a fifth group.  The story is, that an object was detected entering our solar system.  The more telescopes that looked at it, the odder it seemed, until the most likely explanation was that it was an alien spacecraft.  A probe was thrown together and sent, and it indeed was a damaged, alien ship.  It was recovered and scientists took it – and what was left of the crew – apart and figured out all the technology, including the warp drive, or whatever.  So Humans built a ship and went out to meet the galaxy.  But things didn’t go well.  Turns out, desecrating the remains of someone’s dead isn’t a great opening move.  The way I thought of it was humans found a wallet on the street.  We looked in it and saw the person lived a few blocks away.  But instead of walking it back to them, we took the money out of it and hired a limo to take us the few blocks.  And while we did return the wallet, we took all the photos and credit cards out and photocopied them.  Fortunately, for us, the ship was from a civilization in the fourth group who didn’t really have the clout to do anything about it.  If it had been a ship from the second group, they probably would have just wiped us out.  So Humans are out exploring the galaxy, but there is the feeling that we hadn’t “earned” the right to be out there so few species wish to deal with us.

That’s the backstory, but what’s the actually story?  To try to give Humans a better name, several ships are sent far across the galaxy with samples of art.  There is music and sculptures, but the main thing are books translated into several of the bigger languages.  The story basically follows a trader trying to sell Shakespeare to aliens. 

The version I came up with had a father set out with his young daughter to spread the “Humans aren’t all bad” message.  So the daughter grew up interacting more with aliens than Humans.  And after her father died – probably just some accident – she continued.  It may have been twenty years since she’s left Earth, and over a decade since she’s spoken with a Human, but she’s still on the mission because it was important to her dad.  Her father was something of a poet, and after he died she started including his work in the sample of great Human artists.  Which means that at some point, hundreds of years later, when people finally reach this area of space, some of the aliens might want more work from this great Human artist, and the people won’t know who they’re talking about. 

But what’s the meat of the story?  I don’t know.  Maybe some other Human comes looking for her.  Maybe they had a similar origin story and they’ve gone looking for other orphans among the stars because they haven’t had Human contact for years either.  The bland story would be the two would fall in love and have a child to carry on the mission for a homeworld they’ve never seen.  But something different would probably be better. 

Or, maybe it’s a deep dive on what does it mean to be Human.  Like she’s spent so much time with aliens she’s more comfortable with them.  Maybe on the other side of the galaxy, she comes across members of a Fourth Group species that – from a distance – look Human, and she freaks out.  She is so accustomed to “alien” that something “humanoid” disturbs her. 

There are various things that could be done with this, but some things would probably be best not to do.  Like there’s some sinister plot in the galaxy and this single Human is the only one who can stop it, seems like a story from the 1960’s.  Or that by traveling across the galaxy she discovers some long-kept secret from Earth’s past, which seems like a 1990’s story.  A story where Humans aren’t the center of the universe seems more befitting a modern audience.

Free story idea – By Petep’s Boulder

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.

This novel is almost written backwards.  By that I mean there’s an archeological excavation on an alien world.  The novel is broken up into ten or so parts, and each part starts with a page or two of the archeologists finding some item.  Then the rest of that part is set in the past showing how that item ended up at that location.  The next part follows another item a few meters lower down, meaning it was left there decades or centuries before the previous item.  Basically, we learn aspects of this world’s history, but we just start at the last chapter and read back to the first one.

So what’s this novel about?  At some place on this alien world, there is a giant sinkhole, like a hundred meters deep.  (You’ll need to do some math to figure out just how big it is because you’ll probably want it to take at least a thousand years for it to be filled with fist-sized rocks.)  Near this sinkhole is a monastery.  The story goes, that one day this monk named Petep was meditating and reach a point where he split himself into his good and evil halves.  The two fought, and the evil half was thrown into the sinkhole and a boulder was rolled down to bury him.  Petep took on some disciples, before going directly to the afterlife.  The disciples built on his teachings and started a religion.  The followers of the religion began writing their sins on some paper, wrapping it around a rock, and throwing it into the sinkhole, thus casting away their “evil halves.” And they believed that once the sinkhole was filled, it would be the end of the world.  Oh, and “By Petep’s Boulder” is a saying that over the centuries has been a battle cry, their version of “Goddamnit!” as well as their version of, “Aw jeez.”

The novel begins with human archeologists starting to excavate the filled in sinkhole.  After removing a layer or two of rocks, they find some of the sin papers are still there.  They find one with some mundane sin, and that becomes the item for the first part.  We see what the person who wrote it was going through.

As the archeologists dig deeper, it will be harder to find distinct items.  I think one item could be a special rock.  Like most of the rocks thrown into the sinkhole comes from a nearby quarry, but maybe they find a chunk of obsidian or something that came from the other side of the planet, so we learn why that person went through the trouble of carrying it all the way there.  Maybe for a time people carved their sins onto sheets of metal.  But that only lasted for a short time, since it was a waste to throw all of that metal away.  And maybe Big Quarry stepped in to stop it.

But there are also darker items.  Like maybe somebody stabbed someone and they throw the knife into the sinkhole.  This casts away their sin, but also conveniently disposes of the murder weapon.  Darker still is when they find a skeleton.  This turns out to be the last Pope-equivalent.  Petep had two main disciples.  At first, they worked together for the religion, but over the decades they started to split over doctrine.  Eventually two branches of the religion developed, we’ll call them A and B.  For the first two or three parts we read, there is no mention of A.  But then maybe the guy with the knife killed someone because he thought they were an A heretic, or whatever.  During the part with the skeleton, we learn that there was a civil war between the two and that B won.  To cast away the sin of A, they take the last A Pope-equivalent, and throw them into the sinkhole.  The two sides had lived mostly in peace for centuries, but they grew more antagonistic towards each other, eventually leading to the war.  And we learn about all of this in reverse.

Eventually, the archeologists get to the bottom of the sinkhole where there is a boulder that had been rolled down from the surface.  What is underneath it will depend on what kind of story you want to write.  There could be nothing under it, and we could find out that Petep just got high one day and had a vision that got blown out of proportion.  To the point that centuries later, when the people had finally filled in the sinkhole, they – on their own – fulfilled the “prophecy” that it would be the end of the world and they destroyed themselves, which is why it is human archeologists doing the excavating. 

Or maybe there is a skeleton under the boulder.  But whose is it?  There are several ways this can be taken.  Maybe Petep wasn’t a monk, he was just the guy that grew the mushrooms the monks used for their visions.  Maybe some of the monks in training befriended him so they could get some of these mushrooms.  And one day they were out by the sinkhole goofing off and one fell in, and they thought it was all a vision or whatever and rolled a boulder in on top of them.  When they sobered up they panicked, and came up with this “Petep split off his evil half story.” But Petep could only stay “good” for so long, and to keep him from blowing his part of the story, his disciples made him disappear, saying he went off to the afterlife.  But years later, one of the disciples wrote out their confession.  Maybe they threw it into the sinkhole, and somehow it survived the centuries, or maybe it was just hidden away in the Vatican-equivalent vault and the aliens only recently discovered it.  After the sinkhole was filled, and the world didn’t end, the religion died off.  So they started studying the history of it more.  The reason they aren’t doing the excavation, is that the site is still sacred, or taboo in some sense, so they hired human archeologists to excavate.  Any interesting items will go to a museum, and all the rocks will just be dumped back into the sinkhole.

Or maybe it’s Petep’s skeleton under the boulder.  Maybe, Petep was a minor monk who often meditated on the rim of the sinkhole.  From there he could see several boulders already on the bottom of it, and one day – after some mushrooms or other items – he had a vision of splitting off his evil half and imprisoning him in the sinkhole.  And for whatever reason, this idea took off.  Petep went from some nobody monk to someone with disciples.  But the power corrupted him.  Maybe he started sleeping with some of his followers, but things went too far and for whatever reason a couple of them killed him.  Maybe it was a spur of the moment thing, so they were limited in how to hide the body.  So they threw him in the sinkhole and rolled a boulder in.  Although, I’m not sure how well you could aim a boulder to cover a body.  Or maybe they planned things out and took the risk of going down into the sinkhole to bury him.  Although, would they have easy access to a hundred meters of rope strong enough to be able to climb down into the sinkhole?

Or maybe the monks were strict on celibacy, but Petep got a woman pregnant who threated to go to the other monks, so Petep threw her in.  Or maybe Petep was gay, and that was illegal at the time, and his lover threated to tell everyone.  Or maybe Petep figured out he could climb down into the sinkhole each night and find everyone’s sins to blackmail them, and one of the disciples killed him.  Or maybe the disciples were doing that, and Petep threaten to stop them so they killed him.  Or maybe Petep was actually a woman, but at the time women weren’t allowed to be intelligent.  So she became monk Petep to speak her mind.  And when the disciples discovered this, they killed her.

Or maybe Petep was like the Intro to Philosophy teacher at the monastery who taught this “split yourself into good and evil” bit as a thought experiment.  But a couple of his students made a cult out of it.  At first Petep was happy that more people were thinking about his ideas, but over time he saw his students were just using it as a way to gain money and power.  When he tried to stop them, they killed him.  But Petep had told his wife everything, and she wrote it all down.  And maybe this account was passed down through their family for a thousand years or more, until the world was ready to know the truth.  Or maybe it was hidden in the monastery.  After the religion died off, it was being torn down and the true history of Petep was found.  Or maybe the monastery was damaged in an earthquake and the documents were found while repairing it.

There are a lot of ways this novel could go.  Any of the ideas I had, some combination of them, or something completely new.  That’s for you to figure out.

Free story idea – Body parts

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.

This is just the beginning of an idea I’m not entirely sure what to do with.  I see this as being set somewhere in the American west, maybe Texas.  Someplace that in the late 1800s would be ranches, and then maybe the railroad goes through and a small town grows up, hitting a few thousand people by the 1940s.  But since then the population has fallen to a few hundred and now it’s basically a gas station between two more interesting places.

The first part of the story has a series of time jumps.  It starts in the late 1800s with a father and his young son riding out to check on some cows.  They have a dog running with them that finds something in the brush and starts eating it.  They go over to see what it is, and find a left foot.  They look around but don’t see anything else.  They let the sheriff know, but they figure it was just a trapper or maybe an outlaw that ran afoul a bear or something.

One possibility that would let the story explore some issues, would be if the foot came from a black man.  As a white guy, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing that story, which is why in my version it was just a very pale, white foot.  There is a reason for it being very pale, but we’ll get to that.

The next jump is set in the early 1900s.  A doctor is in his Model T going out to make a house call when he sees something lying beside the road.  He gets out and finds – in my version – a very pale, white, right arm.  There is the possibility that the doctor is the young boy who found the foot, or maybe the time jump is enough for the doctor to be that boy’s son.  Who knows.  The sheriff is told, and they do a quick search, but don’t find anything else.

Over the years, more and more bits are found in a 100 or so square mile area.  Sometimes they have been partially eaten by animals, sometimes they look burned, and sometimes they seem to appear from nowhere.  Like, maybe a guy from the 1950s is mowing his backyard when his wife calls him in to take a phone call.  He’s on the phone for five minutes, and when he goes back out, there’s a hand laying a couple feet from the mower. 

At some point, there are enough parts that people realize something odd is going on.  Someone suggests maybe someone killed someone and somehow preserved the bits to throw people off, only to be told that in the past eighty years they’ve found nine feet, six of them left ones. 

Perhaps that doctor started recording all these finds, and those files get passed down town doctor to town doctor as some dark town mystery.  Some of the hands are preserved in alcohol, or whatever chemicals are available at the time.  Eventually, when the technology develops, they do blood tests, and it turns out that all the parts they find all have the same blood type.  And then, once genetic testing becomes possible – and cheap enough – tests are done on recent bits as well as some of the better-preserved ones.  And the tests all come back as identical, which is weird because you have two left feet that were found a decade apart as being the same genetically. 

A few heads have been found, but most have been badly mangled or eaten, so it’s hard to tell if there is any resemblance.  When one is found pretty intact, they do take pictures of it, but nobody ever comes forward to identify who they were.

The story eventually gets to the main character in whatever time period the writer wants to set this story.  She might be the first female town doctor, who may be related to that original rancher.  She finds this whole town mystery thing interesting, and aggravating, but is afraid of going too far out on a limb with all these crazy theories: you know, satanic cult, aliens, bigfoot, whatever.  Then one night she’s driving down a road when she finds a naked man lying in the middle of the road.  She jumps out only to find that he is dead.  Maybe his chest is burnt and broke open.  He looks exactly like the pictures of the full head they’ve found and when they run a DNA test, it matches all the parts.  But nobody ever reports him missing.

And this is where things will depend on whatever story you decide to write.  One version is that shortly after this she is driving down the road and sees an identical man – although not pale – rooting around behind the gas station and when she goes after him he runs off.  Or, this not pale man shows up at her door.  It will all depend on what the story is, because he’s a time traveler.  Either he came back to meet her, or he is trying to hide from her.

Now, the reason for the pale body parts.  They’re clones.  Time travel hasn’t been perfected, so this guy isn’t going to go into the machine on the first try.  But if you’re building time machines, you’ve probably also figured out cloning.  So a bunch of clones are made of the guy, and since they grew up for a month or so in a lab and haven’t seen the sun they are rather pale.  And then they’re sent back to fine tune the controls.  There will be parts of these clones showing up for another century or more in this area.

There are a couple of issues with this story since time travel can’t just be simple.  If you were wanting to conduct a scientific test of the time machine, you’d label your test subjects.  If you knew they’d be blown up, you’d probably tattoo the subject number on multiple body parts so when you have all the records in the future, you can see the results of the test.  The original foot might have “011” tattooed on it, which might match an arm found in 1926 and a head found in 1942.  The full, naked man the doctor finds – from a near perfect test – might have “057” tattooed all over him.  But this would give the story away to any savvy reader.

Well, maybe instead of tattoos there are some micro, high tech trackers.  But do the people in the future have to dig up all these random graves to get the trackers, or do they transmit the data back to the future?  And if they already have these records of all these body parts, do they have to send the clones just to close the loop?  Or were there no records until they started sending the clones because that altered the past?  Or, was there some catastrophe that destroyed the records from this small town so that the people in the future never knew their clones were exploding over Texas?  Whoever writes this story will have to figure all of that out.

Another time travel question will be why is the guy coming back anyway?  Could it be that he eventually gets together with the doctor and they have a child.  And five or six generations later, is that the time traveler?  Or less icky, is the great-great-great-grandchild the one who figures out how to build the time machine and the traveler is just an adventurer?

If you start a story with exploded clone parts raining down over a small town for over a century, that needs to build up to something big.  What that could be, I don’t know.  That’s why I’m giving this idea away.

Free story idea – A new mythology

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.

This is an idea for an online collaborative project that would span years.  It’s possible something similar has already been tried, but I have no knowledge of that. 

It was probably at least ten years ago, I was flipping through the channels late one night when I came across a movie that was set in a time of Greek myths.  There was a period where several of these movies had come out, but I hadn’t seen any of them.  So I watched this one, and while checking the schedule during the commercials saw that one of these other movies was on the next afternoon on another channel.  I watched that one too, and they were both terrible.  I understand that each generation retells stories, dropping things that are no longer relevant or acceptable and adding new experiences.  But for these movies it seemed like they just took the Greek myths and put them through a shredder, then tapped together whatever random bits they needed.  And I thought, Why even bother?  Is the name recognition of Zeus so great you couldn’t just write an original story?

So at first I had the idea of writing out an entirely new mythology.  I started thinking about it, and I quickly saw how enormous the project would be.  I mean, it would basically be as large – or larger – than all the Greek myths we know.  It wouldn’t be just putting a new skin over Hercules and calling it a day, this would be entirely original gods, and heroes, and adventures.  One hope was to eventually build up to an Iliad size of story.

For some time it was just this great idea I’d never have time to do, but then I had the idea of just starting it and letting others fill it out.  What I came up with was to have a website with a map, and some basic world origin canon.  This world began when The Nameless Goddess grew lonely, so she created the world with her torso.  Her flesh became the land, her blood the seas.  Her left eye became the sun, her right the moon.  And her skull became the heavens.  But so this world wouldn’t be without gods, her left leg became god of the land, her right the goddess of the sea.  Her left arm became the goddess of life, and her right the god of death.  These gods appear as humans, and can have kids with humans, but their true form is a limb.  But they learned from The Nameless Goddess and some have made minor gods from toes and fingers.  All but death, who hasn’t diminished any of his power and remains the strongest.  I’m not sure what happened to The Nameless Goddess.  Possibly her essence builds a bridge to the afterlife, but who knows.

So that’s how the website would start.  What would then happen, is the site would be open for people to write historical stories based in this world.  Maybe someone writes a story about how a poor fisherman accidently caught one of the minor sea goddesses, but set her free.  In reward, she granted him treasure and knowledge to set up a kingdom of his own.  Members of the site could read this story, and if they liked it, they could give it canon points.  If it got enough, it would be reviewed to make sure it fit in with everything that already happened, and it would become canon as a historical fact in this universe.  After that, other stories could make reference to the characters and locations.  The hope is that you’d end up with dozens of little kingdoms that trade, and fight, and make alliances with each other.  And along the way there would be stories of heroes and monsters.

To keep things from getting out of hand, there would be a Year 0, set maybe a thousand or so years after the formation of the world.  No stories could be set before Year 0, but there could be myths, which I’ll discuss later.  When the site first goes live would be Year 20, and then each month twenty years would be added to the calendar.  And you’d only be able to write stories set up to whatever the current year was.  So in the third month, you could write stories set anywhere from Year 0 to Year 60.  If you had two stories about a war between two kingdoms, but with different outcomes, whichever story got the most canon points would be the true history of the world, while the other would be relocated to an alternate history section.

But stories on the site don’t all need to be about historical fact.  There would also be a section on the site for in-universe fiction.  Maybe that fisherman story happened in Year 10, so when Year 110 comes around and everyone in that kingdom is celebrating, a playwright from a rival kingdom could write a play that gives a twist on the events.  Instead of canon points, these fictional stories would get popularity points.  The more popular stories – ones that most people in-universe would know – could be mentioned in the historical stories.  But just like in real life, maybe a story isn’t that popular and few people know about it, until someone else comes along and gives it a shiny new coat of paint, and maybe that becomes a popular story. 

Other stories that would get popularity points would be myths.  These would be any story set before Year 0, and they may or may not be accurate portrayals of historical events.  Popular myth stories would likely be referenced in historical or fictional stories. 

So that’s the idea, but you can probably see the enormous headache it would be.  If there aren’t enough members on the site, then the world might grow too slowly and people would stop checking it out.  If there are too many members, then you could get ten stories about how these two kingdoms fought – or didn’t fight – a war, and maybe one gets declared canon before you can read all of them.  There could also be factions that just up-vote their own stories which doesn’t sound like fun.  And then the legal issues of who owns the stories and can they be taken down.  If you want to deal with all those headaches, more power to you.