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"The first draft of anything is shit." [NaNoWriMo]
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Anyways, I'll drop a bunch of one sentence pitches behind spoiler tags and then I'm gonna go to sleep
2. After a popular teen superhero group disappears, their replacements struggle to learn the ropes and solve the mystery of what happened to their old team
3. As mysterious devices rain from the sky, a college dropout finds an old flame in a small town bracing for armageddon
4. One woman lives through every tomorrow of one man's Groundhog Day scenario
5. A marshal in the old west and the daughter of a sheriff race to bring the man who murdered her father to justice
6. The secret diary of the world's first superhero
7. A new graduate joins a struggling newspaper, only to draw the attention of the world's premier superhero
8. An undercover cop, a desperate father and a crafty cat burglar join up with a human only crime organization in a world of supervillains
9. In spite of an apocalyptic event, an aging rock band decides to play the rest of their farewell tour anyways
10. A scientist warps an entire town into another dimension to "keep it pure"
11. The fastest high school freshman alive completes a series of increasingly improbable dares to win the attention of the senior he has a crush on
that's like, half superhero concepts, I guess
these have been
YaYa's opinions
http://www.audioentropy.com/
A young elf who journeyed to a forgotten city, following the final vision of a seer. He is the first of his race without the magic innate to their kind, lost in the Cataclysm when the world shattered and died. When he finds the girl, he bestows upon her a gift: a fragment of a burning, white wing. When she takes hold of it, the fragment reacts to her touch, causing all of its kind to cry out in song as a brilliant white wing manifests from the girl and then fades. The Phoenix has been reborn.
A knight clad in silver-white armor who gazed at the burning sky beyond the wilting land of Faerie, face impassive. He turns from the balcony of the tower and strides through the dimly-lit halls. Faerie guards make way for him, scarcely hiding their contempt as he passes by. He reaches his chambers and locks the doors before opening an ornate chest. He withdraws a sword sheathed within a black scabbard. He takes hold of the golden hilt and draws forth a red iron blade, resolving himself to finish what he started for the sake of the world.
My favourites are 1 and 8. 2 is also cool.
dunno where you'd go with it but it's a terrific premise
Two sort of reminds me of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated. Sounds like it could be real interesting.
I also like the sound of 4, 6, and 10.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
With some tweaking, 1, 2 & 6 combined could be fun.
3 and 10 sound like the plots to a Steven King novel.
4 sounds really interesting.
I think 5's been done in movie format before... It sounds familiar
7 and 9 are good ideas, but I have trouble seeing you get 50K words out of them.
11 would work, but it sounds more like a YA or Middle Grade novel. (That's not a bad thing.)
i messed with this
http://wondermark.com/554/
and eventually ended up with
Going back to an old idea from a fresh perspective, pretty excited about it. My only worry is that the fantasy elements seem somewhat juvenile in comparison, but it doesn't really factor in until the story's climax, so I'll see how I get on.
I like 3, 4, and 9. 10 feels more like a short story to me.
Of course, 9 also reminds me of a scrapped Bryan Lee O'Malley story which had one of the best reasons for the apocalypse ever.
Why I fear the ocean.
Anyways, a lot of these evolved from older ideas I couldn't work into a decent story without changing...almost everything. I'm still pounding my head on the wall trying to work "war with factions based on colors???" into a coherent story, and I think the main problem is that I don't have a whole lot of interest in writing big epic narratives with like...nations fighting and chosen ones or whatever, so I think I might just have to put that one away. But the "rock band tours during the apocalypse" came out of "someone hijacks every radio station and brainwashes everyone who listens and a bunch of people who were listening to cds instead make their way across the country to figure out what happened." And mostly why I dumped that premise is because I read Stephen King's Cell and also my first like, four or five nanowrimo failures were all from me trying to make that idea work
Still don't know how to do the last 1/3 of the plot. Working on it. I've got a character I quite like who is important in the first half and then kind of becomes irrelevant to the rest so I have to fix that.
Also keep having trouble separating my own knowledge from the characters' knowledge. Thinking "That's dumb, they shouldn't do that" because I forget they don't know what I do so wouldn't know not to do that.
Writing is complicated.
Granted, I managed to just squeak by last year with no prep work, but I wrote a bunch of short stories then and I want to do a novel this year which will require a bit more planning ahead on my part.
Fortunately, WoW's new expansion doesn't particularly interest me, and any other new games I'll probably hold off on until Christmas time, so I really only have to manage to squeeze writing time into my current level of busy-ness.
My plan is to start squeezing prep time in now, and then converting that time into writing time on November 1st.
you could
murder them
I'm trying to write a picaresque novel, a la Old Man's War, with a framing narrative. I have to decide between two roughly equally valid options in terms of the setup for the frame.
My character, Eva, is a smuggler with her own ship and crew. Think Firefly, but with aliens. The framing narrative is going to be that her sister is kidnapped by a notorious group called The Fridge, which blackmails people into paying them exorbitant sums of money to get their family and friends back, or compels them to do dirty work to pay off the "debt." Most of the chapters will consist of her doing this dirty work, until the point where things go sour and then explode.
I need to decide at what point in her life this all goes down. Is she in her early 30s, with a fair amount of experience and notoriety but still looking ahead to years of derring-do, when she gets the call and has to shift gears and take care of this problem? Or is she in her early 40s, too old for this shit, tired of the danger and ready to settle down to a comfy desk job, when she's pulled back in for one final hurrah?
I like the latter, but it has an air of finality about it that I find sort of limiting. I can always write prequels later, and there's nothing to say that she won't end up eschewing her retirement dreams in favor of more adventures, but even so. I feel like it would be weird to write the end of someone's story before the beginning, and that's what the latter option seems to be.
What do you guys think?
the latter. Age aint nothin but a number, there's no reason she couldn't keep having adventures after this. She may be ready to retire at the start of the book, but maybe something about this caper recaptures her interest and passion for adventure?
It sounds like early 40's could work well, air of finality optional. I like the idea of her being experienced, and you might want to consider that in a Scifi setting that might not even be close to middle age. Rejuvenation treatments might be available but expensive, meaning her dreams of a safe, cushy job might just be a step on the way to a new life. Maybe she has already wasted the savings she was hoping would be her ticket to a new life in an effort to save her sister, which means that even if she does manage to save her she might still be forced to stay on the path of dangerous adventure to have any chance of earning enough money for the treatment in time.
It's the standard procedure!
yes do this
smof smof smof
I guarantee you, you get that character dead somehow, everybody else will have a MUCH clearer reason for going through the rest of the plot
kill the living shit out of them
only if that character only existed to die as motivation
agency is key, if they are a real character, taking actions, making decisions, and they happen to die, that's not fridging, it's just tragedy
You're the author, everybody lives and dies by your hand, there's always an element of calculation there. But in this case I wouldn't say it's arbitrary - sometimes characters have a natural arc. If you can't find anything for him to do in the last half, his arc is over. The only question is, how to elegantly wrap that up. Death is often a more interesting exit, and provides further story hooks for the rest of the plot, or an emotional punch to further anchor the reader in the narrative.
A female character gave her life to not only save the male main character, but also to stop the villain's plan which would have killed thousands more. Yes, she died, and yes, that did serve to motivate the main character as a result, but she was no helpless victim killed because the plot needed a female body as a prop, she went out heroically on her own terms.
I like her though. She has crazy brain magics.
It's abrupt, but it's realer than her being all "if you need me, just whistle". It leaves a loose end, but as long as it's consistent with her characterisation then it won't be unsatisfying, and if the reader has built up a connection with the character then they'll feel abandoned and you can explore/exploit that using your protagonist's emotional response.
I always want to use NaNoWriMo to really nail down the outline for a graphic novel, but november is invariably a month with 0 free time for me.