Subject: ...Well, this is interesting.
Author:
Posted on: 2018-06-17 06:58:00 UTC
So far, it's an even split between all three. That doesn't help my decision on which one to work on, but at least I know people are interested! :P
You know what I'm rubbish at? Editing. For some reason, while I can churn out a novel-length story (on five occasions, in under 30 days), I have a nightmare of a time trying to sit down and edit it into something worth having - or, for instance, worth publishing (that long-time dream of any writer).
Part of the reason is that, well, publishing a novel sounds hard. If I plunge myself into editing (which often = completely rewriting), only for no-one to ever read it... what's the point?
So we come to this thread, a neat weaponisation of elevator pitches in the war against apathy. Below are titles, first lines, and five-second summaries of each of my four candidate novels (they're all NaNos, so they all exist as ~50K-word stories). What I'm hoping you will do is read through them, click on the link to the survey, and select which of the four you'd be most likely to read if it was published. :) (It's literally just the one question - no name or anything. Takes about ten seconds.)
And then what I'm hoping you'll do is write up your own title-firstline-elevatorpitch post, scrape together a Google Form, and post it so that I (and everyone else) can say what we think of your ideas. And maybe that'll inspire you, too, to get down to some heavy editing, and eventually seeing your name on the cover of a paperback down at the local bookshop. :)
Though in a different vein from Delta's. For the most part, I'm not planning new spin-offs--I'm planning to go back and develop and write for characters I already created who may have gotten a little sidelined, or just plain had their stories delayed. I also have ideas for arcs, and partially finished stories lying around. This is a combination of all that. I do already have a sense of what I’ll be working on first, but I’d love to know what people are interested in!
Without Me (You'll Be Cold in Summer)
"[...] To say that a Klingon has no honor is to provoke a fight to the death."
Allison was gaping at him. "That--that's--"
"We are a very warlike people," Kozar said helpfully. When his new partner continued to gape he grinned at her, sharp and amused. "I have had a Terran partner before, Allison. I know how to make allowance for innocent mistakes."
This is a planned set of interludes, with probably a couple of missions as well. The focus? The epic tale of Kozar's first DIC partnership (in 2013-14), with a human named Allison Brown. She and her character arc actually predate Kozar; even so, I'm glad I didn't start off with her, because she's now had the chance to develop a lot, and I like how she's turned out. She's been mentioned here and there without a name, and recently got her first appearance in this interlude, where Kozar dreams of her.
Essentially: Allison Brown, a mostly comics- and parody musicals-oriented young American woman, wakes up in the PPC and soon finds herself partnered with an alien from a series she knows nothing about. Kozar, meanwhile, has finally gotten repartnered after his move to the DIC (following a tribble incident. Of the sort where his human partner refused to get rid of one). This new partner? Another human. Somehow, it works. Unfortunately, tragedy is waiting in the offing...
Mission: 'Partially Kissed Hero,' or It Gets Worse
Dawn McKenna whistled to herself as she wandered through the grey hallways of the Headquarters of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. Had anyone she knew been in earshot, they would have been unsurprised to recognize the Pirates of the Caribbean theme; as it was, only the walls bore witness.
Dawn McKenna and Jacques Bonnefoy go on a mission to a Legendary Badfic. It is quite possibly the weirdest mission either of them has ever faced. In short? It’s Partially Kissed Hero.
(Yup. This is happening. It’s going to be fun, y’all. And I’m not even being completely sarcastic.)
Mission: 'Blade,' or "...and razed you from hobbition"
"Give me a new partner,” Brenda insisted. "One that wasn't a Suethor two days ago."
No.
“Why not?”
It’s DMS policy not to switch partners before the first mission.
“You made that up.”
The SO shifted some paperwork around on the table and didn’t reply.
Once upon a time, I got Permission with agents Brenda Loringham and Charlie Shoe. They, uh, fell to the wayside somewhat, appearing primarily in an April Fool's Day mission, the comments section of several Multiverse Monitor theater reviews, and quite a few unpublished (or unfinished and unpublished) interludes and missions. One of these unfinished and unpublished missions was their first, to a badfic called "Blade."
Now, I want to rewrite and finish that first mission of theirs.
Senior agent Brenda Loringham and recent OFUM graduate Charlie Shoe try their best not to kill each other while taking on Laiqualassiel, Grelvish-speaking half-elven healer and last of the nymphs of Middle-earth.
Untitled Jacques-Calaquendi Interlude (2014)
Jacques Bonnefoy stood on a grassy Rohirric hill, swaying slightly in the wind. Faint glittery smears on the grass were the only sign of the Sue he’d just pushed through a portal to the current location of a pack of Wargs.
In 2014, Jacques Bonnefoy ends up accidentally visiting the pair of First Age Elves he did a mission with earlier on in the same year. A friendship continues to unfurl between Gurnirel and Naergondir and the human they spent days with in Hobbit disguise, who turns out to be a weirdly immortal human with a still-settling personality.
The ’Verses Aim to Misbehave (Blackout Interlude)
“Sherlock? Sherlock!”
“Ssshh!” A. J. Crowley rounded on the flatmate of the consulting detective in question. “There’s a meatloaf monster running around! Sstop yelling!”
Yup, this is the Blackout Interlude, as I started calling it ages before giving it a proper title. Set during the 2013 HQ Blackout, this is the ongoing, ever-growing “interlude” that, uh, isn’t finished yet. Involved in it are a large cadre of characters, as one might expect: it begins with Dawn, involves the author getting thrown into the mix, featured the original first appearance of Kozar and the Reader (as written by me, anyway, the Reader may have already shown up in the Continuity Council planning?) and just plain has a whole bunch of canon characters in there as well (from Supernatural, Sherlock, Good Omens…) And that’s not all! Tune in for more parts (the first three were posted, and at some point I started overhauling it…?) to find out where Castiel wandered off to, why exactly Kozar, the Reader, and Sherlock are finding people hanging upside down from lampposts in HQ, how Jack Harkness knew the Doctor had been in the PPC (see the end of Lily Winterwood’s interlude for reference), and where in the world Jacques came into this mess…and even more!
…in short? A Blackout romp, featuring many canon characters, the recruitment of an agent pair, the first meeting of future friends (also agents), and a mystery or three. Also, a nice little handful of meta. The original versions of the first three parts can be found here; the ‘first lines’ above are technically from the beginning of one of the scenes in the fourth part.
The Wandering Baron
Eshakhar sat in a nicely, if simply, carved wooden chair in her study at the Castle of Dawn.
A Plort story, in which newly-minted Baron Eshakhar reflects on her new status and the fate of her old friend. Set about a year ago.
Untitled Reader/Naya Piece (Interlude)
It was a nice day, probably, the Reader thought.
The Reader tries to come up with and perfect a gift for Naya. There is poetry. It is bad. Kozar makes an appearance.
Dawn's LotR Nightmare (tentative title)
Jacques woke up, oddly enough, to a familiar voice telling him to get up. Or, well, it seemed to be talking to him...it was a little hard to tell.
“Ardir,” the voice said. A gentle hand squeezed his shoulder. “Ardir, you must awaken. We will soon have guests, and I will have need of your help. Make haste.”
“Listen,” Jacques said, and began to open his eyes, wondering as he did so why no one else was in his bed, “I think you might have the--”
Here he stopped, and stared.
An old, about half-written idea that I think was meant for April Fool's Day (and semi-canonical at best), in which Dawn and a small handful of other agents wake up to find themselves acting out the Fellowship of the Ring events (with some additions)...in disguise...and without any PPC technology. Follow along as they try to figure out how they got there and what they can do to stop the story and get home!
(Aka, the one in which many, many people for some reason resemble Dawn, only a handful of people are real, there are First Age Elves playing Hobbits, bookverse characters exist, there are some suspiciously Sueish characters floating around, and it's very possible the whole thing started with a bit too much fun with a LotR dollmaker on dolldivine.)
(This isn't currently that high on my list of stories to finish, but...I'm curious to see if there's interest in it).
Untitled Reader/Naya alternate meeting (short AU)
Naya had been looking forward to the party, in a way that was really partly just about getting to see her partners in a party setting.
An alternate universe story in which Naya didn't attend a TARDIS repair session and the Guardsman and the Reader never resolved their differences. Instead, Naya meets an awkward young Time Lady at a social event and has a sharp discussion with her partner to finally set the record straight. (Not co-written, characters used with permission).
---
Survey link here!
Twice over the years, I've had dreams that were basically fully plotted stories. I wrote down everything I could remember immediately after waking up . . . unfortunately, I was unable to find the paper with the notes tonight, so they may be dead in the water. But just for the sake of sharing the ideas with you folks:
[the one where zookepers secretly worship an ancient nature deity]
After discovering something primal and powerful buried underneath their land, the higher-up zookeepers begin to follow a dark path, and the lives of neither the animals they once cared about, nor their own human coworkers, hold much value to their rapidly slipping consciences. But then again, their new god holds their lives in equally low regard.
[the one that I barely remember but basically looked at a haunted property from a historical perspective throughout many decades]
Before it was restored and remodeled into the modern-day community center, that building has been many things over the years. The warm, safe home of a broken family. A hideout for Prohibition-dodgers. An ostensible dormitory that morphed into a college party house. A sanctuary for the homeless. But two things have always been constant: the deaths, and the black cat.
So yeah. If I don't find those notes, I'll need to do some serious focused thought on these to be able to recreate all the details from the original dreams. And I'm more focused on my PPC fiction anyway, so. Probably don't count on seeing these published ever? But here's a just-for-fun poll, all the same.
—doctorlit, found by stories in his sleep
Because I've got a bunch of different spin-off ideas running around, and no clue which one I want to write most. Here's my favorites!
Friday the Thirteenth
Grace Trouble Hopper Byron Null knew it was going to be a bad day when she found the first note. It simply read Sorry, in her own handwriting.
(Time shenanigans. Grace Null is many things: slacker, bartender, HQ kid, time traveler… and she and her TARDIS are often the thin line between HQ and Emergencies. This is made slightly more complicated by the nature of HQ, time, fandom, and the part where her moms are around in the present.)
Fish and Feathers
“Talia,” Sarah said, oddly calmly, without looking up from the shattered display case that a tense shift had thrown her into. “I am probably going to burst into flames in the near future.”
(Department of Redundancy Department - who are now very overworked by the load of time-loop fics. Sarah thought she was from World One. She thought she was human. And then she got chucked into a magical artifact from her homeworld, and now she's trying to balance being an Agent, being the partner of a very polyamorous Trekkie, and being a phoenix, too.)
Procedural Codes
“You should just kill her,” Nala said, not breaking eye contact with the black-clad figure in the interview cell, as her fingers itched to hold the lightsaber at her hip. “She’s Sith, it’d be a kindness.”
On the contrary, the Tiger Lily said. We’ve recruited her. Nala Sage, meet Beshaura Kell. Your new partner.
(Department of Internal Affairs - Nala Sage was a Jedi. Then she was a fugitive, then she was a DIA Agent. Now she just has to worry about not murdering her partner. Or getting murdered by her. A procedural, with lightsabers.)
Duct Tape
“I’m sorry,” Julia said, pointing across the lab, “I’m actually over there right now.” The agent turned, saw Agent Dann in profile - and in that moment, Julia ducked and scuttled under the workbench. Out of sight, out of mind, and she breathed a quiet “sorry” in the direction of her doppleganger as the agent who had been bothering her set off across the Lab in pursuit of Dann.
(Department of Sufficiently Advanced Technology! Newbie Julia takes on the multiverse, asking fun questions like “why is this broken?” and “how does that work?” and “why does this ‘Dann’ guy look just like me?”)
The survey!
I voted for Procedural Codes. It's been a long time since we had a decent look at the DIA, and with the loss of Black and Irvine's spinoff their canon is mostly appearances where they're causing way more trouble than they should for people. (I take my share of the blame in this, since Selene was I think the very first recipient of DIA harassment.) So I think this would be excellent to see - and the characters sound like a good sparking point.
For the second question, I also ticked Fish and Feathers. As (I think) the only writer for the DRD (no, I take it back; apparently someone did it way back in '05), I'd be excited to see more of it. And, again, the characters sound fun.
For the final question, I'm afraid I ticked Friday the Thirteenth as a potential problem. Time travel in HQ is... a tricky prospect, and again, I say this as culprit number one. I feel like it can work as a one-off incident (Morgan's little accident, for instance), but sustained, deliberate time travel in HQ has been wisely kept away until now. It just has too many ways to break everything - and, more to the point, too many ways that it should break everything, and would need the story to be unreasonably warped to prevent it. (A solitary example: technology which can impersonate a living being is ridiculously common across the multiverse. Therefore, if time travel is possible in HQ, someone should by now have gone back and replaced all of DAVD with holo-androids before their deaths in Crashing Down, and snuck the real agents off to hide somewhere until the present.)
I also don't like that 'thin line between HQ and Emergencies' part. 'One person protects [compact setting] from disaster every week' doesn't work very well even in more coherent settings; in the PPC, there are hundreds of people (starting with the Flowers, and running down through all the Time Lords and anyone else with temporal sensitivity) who should notice this. Would the Notary let some kid muck around in time? Would Morgan let a child do what she sees as her job, protecting HQ? Would the Flowers tolerate meddling in the PPC's already-fractured internal timeline?
hS
I could quibble over some of your concerns with Friday, but it's also the series I have the least sense of how it should go - I like Grace as a character, but I couldn't pitch the story for the first character arc there the way I could with the others.
(It also... kinda bugs me that you, having written Morgan, are saying (paraphrased) "I don't think you should write a character who protects the PPC like Morgan"? So I'm trying to avoid responding to that bugging.)
Perhaps I've mis-pitched: I wasn't picturing the story as saving the multiverse every week, that seems like it would get old quickly. Rather, I've been thinking of Grace as a vaguely Doctorly figure; albeit one whose bailwick is centered on extradimensional and interdimensional spaces. (And in the PPC, limited by some sort of understanding/policy/Department creation at ~2008 HQST, when the hiatus on Emergencies began- Grace is one of the answers to "wait, why did things stop going terribly badly all of a sudden?")
(Additional quibbling: I guess I don't think the PPC is that small of a setting, if you think of it as a fandom rather than a single world? It seems to me that there's lots of spaces for AUs and other alternate timelines and thanks to plothole shenanigans, they probably interfere with each other far more than most more settled 'verses. I could see a mess there in need of a minder or three.)
Bleh. Please understand that I really appreciate your feedback? You've written in vaguely this space before, and I deeply respect your experience- my desire to quibble is driven far more by my feeling like I've miscommunicated the idea than that I disagree with your feedback.
-Delta
Morgan doesn't have a monopoly on protecting the PPC - she just feels like she should. So anyone who started doing 'her job' for her would, in fairly short order, have to deal with an official visit from the Tigereye Castellan.
Which is fine if that's what you want to write (and if you get permission to borrow her, obvs); but that doesn't seem to be what you were thinking of.
My point with 'small setting' is that it sounded like you were planning on having Grace mostly move in HQ; whether you assume 1000 or 100,000 agents, that's tiny compared to the universe the Doctor is looking after. That means a roving temporal mechanic (so to speak) will either a) have very little to do, or b) be flabbergasted by the number of ways agents nearly destroy the fabric of reality, which (given the people in HQ) would lead directly to c) lots of other time travellers and the like interfering with her by trying to fix things themselves.
As to the hiatus on Emergencies... I actually graphed this a few years back, and it turned out that there wasn't really a hiatus at all. Take a look:
I'm not sure what's happened since 2015 that would qualify, but I'm certain there have been some. Just because we didn't tack the label 'Emergency' on the Blackout, for instance, doesn't mean it isn't one... :)
I still hold that time travel within HQ must be wildly dangerous; moving in a six-dimensional space that's already known to have multiple alternate timelines would be a nightmare. Your brief description for Grace's story didn't sound like it would recognise that, which is what I was responding to.
And, well... you did ask... ^_~
hS
On the this-isn't-a-good-idea side: a potential problem with Time Gentry who specialize in HQ is that they're very hard to ignore: much like Emergencies themselves, a character who is involved in running the timeline as a whole is also involved in the timeline as a whole. And that's a thing we've been avoiding for quite a while, in favor of wanting people to write their own stuff rather than being caught up in centralized continuity.
I've written my own view of what would happen if a time traveller with access to the PPC's abilities decided they had the right to fix things; it's not pretty. Much like superheroes (hello, Injustice!), time travellers have to be limited in what they can do, or else you end up facing the simple question: why does anything go wrong? (Which is also a question that bugs religious people no end, though there are plenty of answers on that end.) That goes double - triple - when they're limited to a fairly compact group of people, and PPC HQ is smaller than a major city.
hS
I just wanted to see where the votes were without skewing the results, and I had to vote again to do so.
(Gravity's Embrace is obviously the best, btw.)
At least, it works for me. Just change the bit at the end from "viewform" to "viewanalytics".
...I may or may not have discovered this through nosily poking about at all the forms.
I wanted to participate here much sooner.
Okay, these two are ideas who have been boiling inside my brains for a while, and would like to write someday. So I'll be writing concepts rather than the elevator pitch. I'll be happy for any comment about them (including which one you prefer, of course).
First one is a fantasy one. The itch I have in mind for now is 'Magic has been used so recklessly it savaged the world. Nine mages pulled out a ritual to bind themselves to the nine (Life, Death, Light, Darkness, Fire , Water, Earth, Air and 'High Magic') different parts of the magic 'spectrum' to stop it, becoming pretty much 'gods' in the processus. And they've to groom successors to take their place eventually, because the monitoring of this monumental energy? Not Good On Your Sanity'.
Includes (of course) at least one of the group feeling not warm and fuzzy at the idea, up to using some sorts of soul-eating demons as an army to help with that disagreement, reincarnation as a feature of the world, not (exclusively) antagonistic use of undeads, desire to build and explore at length an entire world, with culture trying to avoid the 'nation of hats' while eventually having nine major protagonists (the mentionned successors) eventually coming together to take care of the situation.
Including various actors out for their own gains, and said gods become gradually more unhinged, including cataclysms of 'wild magic' when the control slips...
Number Two is a fantasy one too. It's one less developped, by here are the ideas I kept for now. A world stuck in a tug of war between the vile 'demons' and their humans thralls and mankind, supported by the luminescent 'angels'. Protagonist ends up in problems when he shows aptitude to the demon's brand of magic, rather than the humans' elementarism or the holy magic taught by the angels, and something as a pretty surefire sign of demonic allegiance. Cue problems and story.
And eventually a nasty revelation: both demons and angels are pretty much eldritch veings waging a multi-worlds war, with the local planet being only one more battlefield, and none of them as a species (of course outliers exist) care about the local tools.
Even less because... Well, magic is pretty much an extension of the ecosystem as I see it in this setting, and while demons-controlled lands already look like the sort of wastelands they favor, the angels are crafty enough to use humans mages to soften the blow where their presence is the heaviest... Because Bleak Desert of Endless Still Order isn't that sexy of a presentation to the drafted locals liking crops of food and this sort of nice things. Meaning the big stakes become taking care of both sides of this war to make sure the humans can live their own destiny, and have a planet to live it.
Talking about my WIPs while they're still WIPs is kind of anxiety-inducing for me. But it's always good to get feedback, so here goes.
The Orktili Invasion (Working title)
The architecture in Pergamia had been specifically designed to hide the fact that people lived there from the eyes of hunting dragons. This is most likely the reason the Orktili chose it as a base of operations when they came from beyond the stars.
Sci-fi and fantasy happily married, as they were always meant to be. Aliens invade a magical country ruled by a power-hungry despot. It's up to her daughter, her banished younger brother, a peasant, and a pirate to figure out why they're here and how to get rid of them.
The Adventures of Laura Davidson (Also a working title)
Laura Davidson learned her first swear word from the aspen tree across the street. Aspen Trees, as everyone knows, are foul-tempered things with no concern for Manners or Propriety or, indeed, for the Children, and as Luck would have it the only one in the neighborhood of Forthington Square was directly across the street from the house she grew up in.
Urban fantasy, inspired by all the tall tales my dad told me when I was a kid. Welcome to a world where it is possible to walk to school uphill both ways. Someone has sabotaged the Propellers that Make the Earth Go 'Round, but the only person who knows is seven-year-old Laura Davidson and no one believes her.
And here's the form!
(Upon further reflection, it seems to me that I tend to be bad at naming things. Alternate name suggestions are welcome as well!)
Although I love the Laura Davidson concept just that little bit more.
I fully intend to write both sooner or later, but we'll see if it works out.
The main planet my Cycle of Worlds pitch is set on has basically space elves... except they look like four-armed lizardmen. But still, magitech is so much fun, and the idea of your first pitch kind of reminds me of the premise of Cowboys and Aliens... wild west meets sci-fi. Mashups like that are just a blast.
That sounds pretty fun. And hey, aliens that aren't basically humans with wacky hair and/or squiggly lines on their faces! That's always a plus.
I really liked Cowboys and Aliens. I honestly can't figure out why it wasn't more popular. It was a really fun movie.
... 'aliens invade a magical country'. ^_^
Though that first line for Laura Davidson is spectacular.
hS
I voted for The Adventures of Laura Davidson, because 10/10 I would read it. It sounds adorable and funny and heart-warming.
Orktili sounds pretty cool too, to be honest! I'm just more wary, since I haven't seen fantasy and sci-fi happily married yet. If you can do it well, though, good for you and I would absolutely read it!
I'm glad you like The Adventures of Laura Davidson. It's something of a recent idea, so it's not properly formed yet, so I'm glad it's coming out coherent now.
As for sci-fi and fantasy, I've seen good sci-fi with fantastic elements (Homestuck is a good example), and once or twice I've run across a reasonably seamless meshing of the two. (The title escapes me but I read a book as a child about an interplanetary coalition that developed supernatural powers and used them to keep planets on a natural developmental path.) What I have never seen, however, is a solid fantasy base with sci-fi applied well to it. So naturally I set out to fill in the perceived gap in the fictional library.
What I'm trying to say is I don't know if it can be done. I hope it can, but we'll just have to wait and see. In any event, I totally understand your reservation.
So I made my 20k goal for my 2009 NaNo, but it doesn't have a title. It's the story of how the king's gadabout second son finds his calling as a military leader and saves the kingdom from invasion (yay!), but also gets stuck having to be king (boo!). Oh, and along the way he made a deal with a mysterious old man to put in a good word for him with the king in exchange for critical information about the invasion. I'm sure it's fine.
This is a prequel to the main events.
There was a bee on the windowpane. It buzzed ineffectually against the green glass, apparently unconcerned with the distorted image of the world beyond; only drawn to the light.
Apparently I started a story in the main plot for a 2011 NaNo, but forgot about it. Seriously, when I opened the file, I thought it was going to be something else. I have no memory of writing the thing it actually is. It has a title, but it wouldn't be the book's title, so eh.
Snow swirled down from the heights of the mountain peaks, driving through the gaps between peak-roofed houses in the tiny village of Finleen huddled below and gathering in drifts against crosswise walls. Through the dark, icy winter air, a baby's wail arose from one of the houses, cutting through the low moaning of pine trees in the wind.
(Dear god, that run-on. Ow.)
The something else isn't a novel. Probably it's a chapter in the same book as the 2011 thing. Again, there's a title, but not one I'd actually be using. Eh.
The celebration of the Spring Equilux, which marked the end of winter and the beginning of the new year, was always an important event in the divided kingdoms of the north, and none prided themselves on their festival more than Wickham.
... I think I'm bad at first lines. And titles.
All that stuff is in the same world, anyway. It's middleweight fantasy—there is magic, but it's not abundant; some fantasy creatures like elves, vampires, and dragons exist, but they're part of the natural world and obey meta-physiological rules. The Powers That Be are just another order of being (but some of them have big heads about it).
And I have no idea how it all fits together. Plot? Hahahaha. Ha.
A couple other ideas I've toyed with, but haven't put any serious work into:
Moon magic
Modern fantasy. People are born with magic at various power levels according to location and phases of the four moons. Heather arrives in the right place at the right time to be the biggest magical deal in about two thousand years. As she comes into her power, all the major magical/political players want to control her, but she has to deal with the reccurrence of a major lunar alignment that spells big trouble for the world if she can't learn what she needs in time. Fortunately, there's an eccentric but endearing guy with a foreign accent who says he knows what's going on and can help! I'm sure nothing bad will happen to him.
Supernatural SWAT team
What it says on the tin. Badass normal newbies Sophia Hue Phan and Tim Gurney join established team members Joe Donovan (a vampire) and Ban MacCormac (a werewolf); have to deal with witches, hackers, and confusing but steamy relationship polyhedrons. I dunno, I'm pretty sure I just wanted to make up pretty people with cool names.
No vote, because seriously, there's nothing to vote on. I'll let you know if I actually work out a decent plot for any of these at any point.
~Neshomeh
Just a heads up, it's not gonna be a wide variety of genres. Or... ideas for that matter of fact. I'm a one-trick pony unfortunately, and it's a matter of picking the most interesting idea:
Number Thirteen, Zauber Street
You do NOT want to visit this house... unless you're mad, desperate, or somewhere in-between.
A ragtag bunch of miscellaneous magic users and a collection of stories about their odd-jobs. Featuring: a junkie shaman, an African Spider God, a Russian witch, an androgynous empath, etc.
________________________________________________________
Cerberus
Like the Hound of the Underworld, we stand guard so that no filth escape their settlements.
Once again, urban fantasy. This time using the principle of Three Ms: Magic, Murder, Mystery. Cops, guns, investigations, vampires, monsters and shapeshifters.
_______________________________________________________
The Hunters/The Magicians
This one is tricky, as it's two series set in the same universe. So, I'm gonna kinda cheat and summarize both:
- St. George Hunting Company revolves around professional monster hunters and their inner scandals
- The Baskerville Society is the magicians' cabal answering directly to the Queen of England
Let's see if <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEJA7s29KxPGi6RcdIravIa0nZF0D6vV4ktgprvmH50MxHQ/viewform?usp=sf_link">THIS LINK works
The Bone Man
In a small back room, cool against the heat and dimming out the harsh afternoon sun, the doctor cracked his knuckles and went to perform a miracle.
Urban fantasy. A young Ten-Pound Pom girl in 1950s Australia is training as a nurse under a Reiki practitioner and osteopath. These quack medical practices... actually work as advertised. Think Harry Potter meets Call The Midwife with a healthy dash of cosmic horror.
The Little Old Man From Number 22
Well, there goes the neighbourhood.
Horror fantasy. Two alternating viewpoints in a small corner of slowly-gentrifying Deptford: one a serial runaway teenage girl who's been adopted by a hipster couple with something to hide, and the other a little old man who's been there forever. Literally. One of them's the villain. It's not her.
Fleabag
My sister's cat has filled the entire bloody house with fleas.
Zombie apocalypse story with a difference: this time we experience it from the point of view of Patient Zero in the outbreak. What does zombification really mean? How does it affect your life? Aside from, y'know. The obvious.
International Klein Blue
You're looking at a blue rectangle mounted on a wall and you're thinking "My kid could do that" or "How is this art?" or variations on a theme of fatuous closed-minded martinetry.
Combination Lovecraftian cosmic horror and... art history lecture? Sophie's World for the horror genre and modern art movement combined. Formless beings and strange old men and what we have to do to survive.
---
Voting happens here.
For reference, I voted for The Words Of The Voice. It sounds the most interesting, if REALLY similar in concept to Will Self's The Book Of Dave.
I've voted for The Bone Man, because it's a) least horrifying, and b) interesting! I also know Kaitlyn would like it.
I also find IKB interesting based on the summary - anything that's described as 'Sophie's World for...' is going to catch my eye. :)
As for The Words of the Voice, I see (by way of Wikipedia) what you're getting at. The difference is that The Words... is presented as an actual body of ancient myth - just with a scientific basis. The oldest deities are incarnations of things like the expansion of the universe, gravity, light, chemical bonding and so forth. Later on we run into the more human-centric gods, at which point we drift away from science a bit and into sheer myth: there's not a lot of science in the extended adventures of Dyfais queen of Brenin, for all that she technically founds the Bronze Age.
Look, I did say it was weird.
hS
So... I don't really do novels; I've tried, and I can't write good descriptive language for the life of me. However, I can draw, so my goal is to get a graphic novel published eventually!
I'm only working on one at the moment, so there's no need for a survey, but it'd be really nice to hear if people are interested in the concept or not.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Maelstrom Trio
I'm starting to see why no one wants this job. I mean, it's not like it's not fun to get beat up by demons on a daily basis, but I certainly don't get paid enough for it.
Urban fantasy/comedy. On an Earth where magic and monsters have been a fixture of life from the beginning, G.U.A.R.D. ensures that normal people get the protection they need. Details the misadventures of three G.U.A.R.D. agents - a mild-mannered magician, a trashy and foul-mouthed elf, and a human woman as good at kicking butt as she is at keeping the other two from killing each other - as they do their best to protect their assigned neighborhood from assorted heinous monstrosities while trying to deal with life, each other, and the friendly tentacles they can't seem to evict from the kitchen sink.
It sounds like you've got a good, solid foundation for a world here. I'm biased, as well, because I really enjoy episodic almost sitcommy stories that are still fantasy or sci-fi. I hope you go through with this! I'd read it.
Thank you for telling me that! Motivation is often hard to come by, so it's really nice to hear something like that said in no uncertain terms.
As a side note, can you recommend any other almost-sitcom fantasy/sci-fi stories? I only know of one other one; the show Being Human, so recommendations would be appreciated!
I like the "friendly tentacles they can't seem to evict from the kitchen sink" - I think it does a good job communicating a feel for this world. Is there an overarching plot growing behind their various misadventures or is it more of a series of episodic stories?
Also out of curiosity, what does G.U.A.R.D. stand for?
I'm glad you liked the tentacles! There is not an overarching plot, at the moment, but I have a few ideas that I could develop more.
Glad you asked! G.U.A.R.D. stands for Guardians against Unseemly Atrocities and Relics Division. It's rather unwieldy, but it is what it says it is, and guarding is what they do, so I think it works (?).
Truth be told I've barely even started most of these projects, but I think they're the most likely to go anywhere if I ever actually apply myself to writing a proper novel.
The Bastion Walls
The sun beat down, the Walls rose up, and six sets of hoofbeats drummed out a canter on the red desert sands
Fantasy. A bright young dragoon captain, one of the few survivors of the Eight Bastion, must set musket ball and sabre against demon fangs and claws, and lead his men to safety.
The New London Paranatural Society
For the first time in forty years, Gregory Allen Fielding stood beneath a silver sun, and found nothing.
Urban Fantasy-ish. Just about every myth and monster exists, they just left. Their world's the High Road, our world's the Low Road, but you probably won't end up in Scotland if you follow that first one. Sort of like Van Helsing in the 1800s, only with harmonica rifles and Werewolves in waistcoats.
H.O.M.E. Away from Home
Something's following us, I'm sure of it. I'm going to prove it, I'm going to catch it, and who knows, maybe this will finally convince my boss to give me a raise?
Soft sci-fi. A gunner on a rundown space station is sure she's spotted something moving in the dark, and she's fairly certain human ships don't have quite so many tentacles.
The Bloody HarvestI haven't actually got an opening line for this one shhhh
Fantasy, with some horror/mystery thrown in. A man seeking to marry science and magic moves to the village of Orchran Hills to pursue his craft in peace, but when he's framed for murder and black magic, he finds there may be more to the small town than he hoped.
Google Form (I'm not sure if this link actually works, I've never used Google Forms before)
Now, as for your pitches, I was really torn between the first two. I like the sound of the Kraken-Knights setting, but The Next Great Wizard won out. It just seems like the kind of story that appeals to me. That "Or is that just me?" Bit at the end of the first line just grabbed me.
The Words of the Voice also sounds like an interesting concept, and holy hatstands do I love the first line for Gravity's Embrace. That is a hook and a half, sir. Well done.
I mean, I voted for The Bastion Walls, simply because I'm a sucker for very personal epic fantasy, but all your other books sounded fabulously entertaining and engrossing. I'd like to see any and all of these on bookstore shelves!
I'm glad you like them, The Bastion Walls especially, as it's sort of my flagship project. It's basically my love letter to military history and fiction wrapped up in fantasy trappings. A bit niche, perhaps, but it works for me.
Link
Luckily Ix was around to tell me how to get it right this time. Thanks, Ix!
(The Nanovels I have no longer hold my interest, so these are actually just ideas I have bouncing around, some of which I've done some writing on, some of which I have not.)
But my vote goes to Alchemy or Chemistry. I really love And It Goes All the Way Down, it's got a great sense of mystery to it, but I just can't say no to a college student interacting with dragons and alchemy and the like, especially in Scotland.
.
.
.
.
.
*crickets*
.
.
.
*thumbleweed strolling by*
.
.
Nobody? Ronnie James Dio? The King of Metal?
.
.
.
"Killing the Dragon"! I was referencing the dragon attack from Should I Major in Chemistry, or Alchemy? for which I voted!
.
.
.
*sigh* Those are the jokes, people!
I checked And It Goes All The Way Down; that's a fantastic first line, and the concept is exciting. But I also love Chemistry or Alchemy?, because... well, I'm a chemist, and there should be more chemist protagonists (even if they're alchemists). ^_^
It also sounds a bit like the Magician's House quartet, which I loved growing up. So it gets bonus points for that.
hS
Here are a couple of the different stories that I've worked on, or am working on.
One of them actually did get picked up by a local publisher, but they went out of business and I never got to see it come to fruition. Can you guess which one? :P
I only have three to offer, rather than five. Sorry!
The Pureblades (Urban fantasy)
What happens when you gain magic that was never yours to begin with?
A young boy learns his older sister is a member of a group that hunts demons, and joins as well, taking what was rightfully his best friend's place.
The Cycle of Worlds (...Fourth-wall breaking humor? Is there a genre for that?)
So, yeah, you died. And the author's gotten lazy and decided your role is to save the multiverse from a megalomaniacal tyrant. Have fun!
When people die, their souls are ferried across the boundaries of reality by Death to be reborn as an entirely new species on a completely different planet. Most people don't remember their past lives, but a rare handful do.
Neither Heir nor There (portal fantasy is the right term, hS?)
This is why you don't put children in charge of Mac Guffins.
Two friends had a sleepover as children. One of them lost an amulet that had been passed down through the family. Years later, long after falling out of touch, the other found the amulet, just in time to get kidnapped into a fantasy world and proclaimed the heir to a world-saving power.
Google Form
The Pureblades sounds right up my alley, and Cycle of Worlds seems like a riot, but the whole childhood sleepover lost MacGuffin idea is just too charming for me to resist. Plus, I have a soft spot for the reluctant/accidental hero type.
Also the title. The title is just great.
Oh, and I'm guessing the published one was The Pureblades. Just a hunch, really.
I pitched the idea at a panel back in middle school, so honestly, it’s probably for the best the publisher went out of business. Can you imagine the sort of dreck I might’ve put out? :P I really do love the idea, though, so one day... one day.
The Heir one is just an idea I’ve made a few notes on at the moment, but I just really love the idea of the Chosen One never actually getting chosen and some poor schmuck gets stuck in their place. ;)
It does sound like a really fun idea, but I can definitely understand being thankful for a youthful endeavor being kept out of the wider world. In fact, I just watched a video on that same subject. It's quite amusing.
It really does seem a lovely subversion of the whole "child of destiny" shtick. It reminds me of something, too, but I can't for the life of me remember what.
So far, it's an even split between all three. That doesn't help my decision on which one to work on, but at least I know people are interested! :P
At one point my pie graph was a perfectly quartered circle!
It's actually shaken out a little now, with a clear preference for Kraken Knights, and a slightly smaller contingent supporting Gravity's Embrace (and frankly I agree with the majority here that those are the best two ^_^), but it's still not the strong 'one of these is great' result I was expecting.
Which is good! And is also the reason I started the thread! :D
hS
As much as I love Deapool: Genesis The Cycle of Worlds, I had to vote for the Pureblades. Sounds like the Shadowhunters done right (although the name's equally as silly. No offence).
I feel like The Pureblades could be everything I love about the Shadowhunter Chronicles, minus the clunky fanfiction-esque writing, and I can't wait to see it be published sometime! That being said, The Cycle of Worlds sounded like a complete blast as well.
Is the summary for Gravity's Embrace suggesting that the spaceship itself is approaching him? That's the impression I'm getting, anyway.
Pilots from New Etruria and the Celtic League (among other nations) essentially act as their ships' computers; for the duration of their service, they are treated as identical with their ships. It's all a bit weird. ;)
So yes, NES Areatha is both a human and a spaceship.
hS