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.

Random Writing Tips – Cliché timing

 

Imagine this story.  One of the main characters is traveling to some castle and comes across a woman.  We the audience know that she is the other main character, the Queen who was travelling amongst her people and got lost, or something.  They start heading to the castle, and have some adventures on the way, and the Queen falls for the other character.  She finally works up the courage to tell them who she is, just as they crest a hill and see a dragon rampaging over her castle.  Interrupting someone just before they can tell a big secret is dramatic, but it has been done so often it’s now cliché.  You can probably think of a couple examples from movies or TV shows without straining too much. 

Another example of cliché timing is how someone will be explaining their backstory, or some key aspect of world building, and just as they finish – sometimes within seconds – an alien will burst out of the wall for an action scene.  On one hand, having action scenes in between all the exposition dumps is an efficient way to give all the necessary information without it being too much, but on the other hand we’ve also seen that a thousand times before. 

Cliché timing is an efficient way to give the readers needed information and to keep some tension for the sake of drama, but it also makes it easy for the reader to see the scaffolding the story is hung from.  And when the reader can see the structure of the story, it becomes harder for them to get lost in it.  Some cliché timing can help the story, but too much can leave the reader rolling their eyes.

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Image from Pixabay.

My writing goals for 2023

 

One of my writing goals for 2021, which carried over to 2022, will carry over to 2023.  That’s to finally finish, and publish, my collection of fifty stories about writing, The Uncapped Pen.  I am nearly done with it.  There’re one or two stories that are about 90% done, and the entire thing needs a good polish, or two.  But my goal is to finish it up and get it out, hopefully by April. 

Last year I wrote that I hoped to finish off a story and start submitting it to magazines.  I did finish it, and I did submit it to four or five magazines, but none took it.  There are a couple other places I could submit it to, but they’ve been closed to submissions.  Some because they only take submissions for a couple of months each year and I missed them, but others because they had all their upcoming issues filled.  So I need to keep a watch for when they open so I can submit.

My general plans are to write more, try to finish more stories to submit, and to start work on my next collection, Collection X.  We’ll have to see how things go.

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Image from Pixabay.

Writing Newsletter Fourth Quarter 2022

 

In the last three months, I’ve posted the short stories “The Message” and “A Dragon Named Bob.”

I also posted a haiku on Twitter, as well as one on Mastodon.  In my last newsletter, I said I hadn’t posted any stories.  While true, I forgot that I had posted another haiku on Twitter during those months. 

I’ve also reposted the story “Tricked,” “A Snowball’s Chance,” and “Revenge.”

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Over a year ago, I started a series of blog posts called Free Story Ideas.  These are ideas for novels or movies or whatever that I won’t live long enough to write.  So I’m giving them out to the world.  I think I mentioned them in my Newsletter when I started, but I didn’t list them.  But recently I realized that while not finished stories, they at least give an idea of my writing ideas.  So I’ve decided to start including them in my newsletters.  You can see the full list here, but in the last three months I’ve given away the ideas for “Body parts” and “By Petep’s Boulder.”

In a related topic, in December I started tooting a shorter version as random story ideas I’ll never get around to writing.

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In actual writing news, I’m finishing up The Uncapped Pen, my collection of fifty short stories dealing with writing in some manner.  I’m aiming to put it out in April.  That won’t be in time for my next newsletter, but I should have more definite news by then.

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Image from Pixabay.

Random Writing Tips – Take a challenge

 

The way to get better at writing is to write.  But just writing “I will be a better writer” a million times won’t make you a better writer.  You need to try new things.  And since this will be posted in late December, why not start the new year with some challenge.  (Of course, if you come across this post in March, you don’t have to wait until the following January to try something new.)  If you’ve only written stories, write a poem.  If you’ve only written romances, write a horror story.  The way to get better at writing is to stretch your writing muscles and write something you’ve never written before.

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Image from Pixabay.

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.

Election Day Sale

Several years ago, I started having Election Day sales for my collection of short stories of a political nature, Political Pies.  For the last few sales, I’ve also included a few other of my books.  The main reason I do this is it’s me doing a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny part of hopefully getting people to vote.  The idea being you can download some of my books for free so you have something to read while you stand in line to vote.  It’s not much, but hopefully it does someone, somewhere, some good. 

There are those who think politicians should be the ones who decide who wins elections and not the voters.  The only way to defeat them is for “We the people” to vote in overwhelming numbers and show them that that is not how American democracy is supposed to work.  So if you live someplace where – often because of their interference – there is a long line to vote, grab any of these books that look interesting, and make sure your phone and/or Kindle is fully charged.  Then get in line, stay in line, and make your voice heard.  Democracy depends on it.

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The following ebooks will be free to download from Friday November 4th, through Election Day on Tuesday November 8th.

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.

A Man of Few Words

A Man of Few Words is a collection of fifty of my flash fiction stories. What would really happen if a “T-Rex on steroids” attacked a city? Why do science fiction writers make the best lovers? How does a company get to Second Base with VIPs? I explore these questions and more using less than 1,000 words and in various genres from humor to horror and general fiction to science fiction.

The majority of the stories were previously published (most on my website) but all were revised for this collection. In addition, each piece is accompanied by some background information on the origin of the story or a funny tale about the writing of it to give a fuller experience.

The Future isComing

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

Seventh Story Stockpile

Over the years, I’ve posted several short stories on websites that later – for one reason or another – died. While the corpses of some of these sites are still around where you can read the stories, many have vanished from the internet. And since there are few sites that will publish such previously published works, the only way you could read them was if I self-published them in a collection.

In addition to such “lost” stories, I’ve included some new stories that – for one reason or another – I felt I’d have a hard time finding someone to publish them. So Seventh Story Stockpile basically contains stories I didn’t know what else to do with.