Following on from a recent post, I have two new potential novels or series. And they’ve both come from ideas that started as prompts on Medium.
One of them was a word: IMPLICATION. It was the prompt for a drabble.
The other was this picture.
I’ll tell you my ideas for both, I think you’ll see what I mean about the possibilities for taking the stories further.
The Drabble.
At just 100 words, this was what I wrote for IMPLICATION, the image is from Microsoft Designer. Yes, it’s A.I. generated.
I was minding my own business, nursing a whisky at the bar, when she sat beside me.
“Buy me a drink,” she said, “then take me outside.”
I looked; she was pretty, the implication was clear. But…
“Sorry, sugar,” I said. I showed her my left hand. “I’m already spoken for.”
“You don’t understand,” she hissed. Now, there was panic in her voice. “There’s a man over there, blue tie. If I leave on my own, he’s going to follow me and kill me.”
That was different; I guess I’d been mistaken.
It looked like I had a new case.
When you think about it, there are plenty of things in that drabble I could expand on.
All sorts of who, what, when, where and why questions are crying out for an answer.
I’ve wanted to write another detective noir for a while, my novel Ribbonworld had that kind of vibe and it was fun to write it in a sci-fi setting.
I even have a provisional title, Another Rainy Night in Helcon City.
I think it fits the genre perfectly.
Then the picture.
When I saw it, I spotted the dichotomy of a motor vehicle and dinosaurs together straight away. I was reminded of a short-lived T.V. series called Terra Nova. I watched it and loved the idea but for some reason, it wasn’t given a second season.
I guess it was just another of the quirky genre mashups that nobody else but me ever seems to like.
I wanted to take the idea of time travellers discovering modern things in an ancient world and couple it with a theory known as the Silurian Hypothesis.
Then throw in the potential existence of alternative universes and mash it all up together in an adventure.
I wrote a short piece, which you can find here,
Writing it left a lot of unanswered questions, which are ripe for development.
All these extra ideas mean that the list of possible projects is increasing. Rather than write them as novels, I’m drawn towards publication as weekly serial fiction on Medium, as long as I can keep ahead of the need to write a new chapter every week.
I initially went to Medium because I wanted to move away from writing novels and reawaken my creativity. I seem to have succeeded, at least in part.
My mind is overflowing with new material. All I need to do is resist the urge to make every piece I write into a novel.
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