It’s not that I’m giving up on my current novel project, The Last of the Steamers, but I think that maybe it can’t hurt to have other things to work on. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by Steamers and almost intimidated, plus I don’t want to be a one-trick writing pony. Surely having a few things to work on is good for when, suppose, I don’t feel like working on Steamers one day and don’t want to totally waste otherwise-good creative time. So, with bold vigour, I’ll outline a few ideas that have crystallised to varying degrees in my mind, and in my notebook:
The Dark Ages
This is a short story I’ve kinda started but not gotten very far into, which is somewhat based on some personal experience I had a few years ago. It follows a 16-year-old teenager called Jeff as he confronts the fact that his group of friends didn’t really care about him, and one simple event degenerates into a long, bitter feud with tragic circumstances for all involved.
Oranges and Lemons
This is another idea for a short that I had, and thought was interesting. The idea came to me at about 3AM and I just had to commit it to paper: a citrus farmer in sleepy rural America, 1985, has his livelihood ruined by an unscrupulous chemical plant built upstream of the river his farm takes its water from. Any attempt to complain or otherwise rectify this situation is met with abject hostility, and, at his wits end, the farmer is forced to take drastic action, not only to save his farm, but the whole town that he has called home for years. Unfortunately, the ‘drastic action’ has unintended consequences that make the situation worse.
Meat (working title)
I always thought George Orwell’s Animal Farm was awesome. It’s a great allegory of the Cold War of its time, done so in a way that’s approachable and understandable to anyone. It also quite rightly points out the flaws in communism. My idea for Meat is a descendant of Animal Farm, in that it’s an alternate reality where cows, sheep and pigs rise up to overthrow humanity and punishes it for the appalling conditions imposed on animalkind. Eventually, the animals become no better than humanity when people are being farmed for food instead of the animals.
Civilization
This is a funky one. An Iron Age civilization flourishes, survives wars and famines but is lost to a natural disaster. The ruins of a great Wonder are lost forever – until their unexpected discovery in 1935, and are pursued by two teams of explorers, one who want to preserve these relics for humanity and another simply out to exploit them for selfish profit.
I also had another couple of ideas where I played with this concept:
- Scrap the 1935 setting? Go “modern”?
- Make it a story of one family’s progression through the Iron Age from peasants to overlords, with details of the wars, feuds and politics of the day?
Colonization
If you hadn’t guessed, I friggin’ love HG Wells’ masterpiece, The War of the Worlds. I had an idea, though: what if humanity invaded Mars? Put the boot on the other foot? Instead of making it a direct reversal of WOTW I thought it might be interesting to see how humanity and the Martians might try to co-exist on Mars before a battle for supremacy, and ultimately existence, has to be fought. Might also be interesting to defy the sci-fi golden idea of unity government, with various interest groups, say humans who believe we should leave Mars alone because it belongs to the Martians, or Martians who feel that their race is at a dead-end and humanity would better reside on the Red Planet.
Inhumane
After reading a few of the Kay Scarpetta books after getting the first, Post Mortem, as a present from a friend a while back, I thought I could try my hand at a crime novel. Sounds like fun! My premise is that a influential member of the Cabinet is assassinated the night before a vote on a centrepiece animal rights bill, and it seems like animal rights protesters are behind the killing, and the investigation discovers some interesting home truths in regards to both the animal rights extremists and the family life of the influential Minister.
Doctor Who: Time Delay
I am a self-confessed passionate Whovian, and, if you were not aware, I have before written a couple of amateur versions of my favourite show. I’ll write about those later, and embed videos where I can, but the Doctor Who team has been a little dormant of late, the last filming being done 2 years ago. I figured our little project needed wrapping up properly, so I’m devising a 50-minute yarn which features our sortof-ish version of the Sixth Doctor. In my new script, preliminarily called Time Delay, the TARDIS is forced to land on Earth after being caught in a neutron storm, and the Doctor realises that a void is being ripped in the fabric of time and space itself, and has only two hours in which to save the world. This is very, very preliminary and of course subject to change. I actually wrote a different outline called Hallowed Turf but I will probably be discarding most of it as it’s a little top-heavy and over-ambitious. You can read that outline on Scribd here.
Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing what you all think of my ideas. Please, please, please leave a comment if you’d be so kind. Cheers!
I’ll be duplicating this post on the Writing page so you can always go there later.
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