Three Projects

And here we are at the first real milestone.  I haven’t been numbering these posts in the title, but this is post #25.  According to my original blogging schedule, post #25 was supposed to be on Easter Sunday.  But then there was that five month gap where I neglected to post anything, so… we get post #25 today instead. 

But hey!  Post #25!  Half-way to #50!  A quarter of the way to #100!  Look at me go!

Okay, enough about all that.  Since this blog is (ostensibly) about writing and its evil twin not writing, I figured that we’d do another post that’s on that topic today.  Specifically the things that I try to write on the occasions that I try to write. 

The Rotation

One of the more common pieces of advice that I hear about defeating writer’s block is to have more than one writing project going at once.  The theory being that if you get stuck while writing one of them, you just jump over to one of the others.  

This advice doesn’t actually help me because I’m not stuck on one project, I’m stuck on all of them.  Millions of ideas, stuck at the starting line on each and every one.  Forward motion (aka actually writing) consistently eludes me.

But do I like the concept of having multiple projects in play to work on.  So among all of the various projects that I theoretically have in development (and Hollywood’s version of Development Hell has nothing on mine), I usually have about three that I consider myself to be currently developing.  If I were to miraculously start writing, it would be one of these three projects that I’d write. 

  

Traditionally, projects would move in and out of that rotation as new ideas occurred to me, or as new aspects of old ideas manifested in my brain.  But (up until very recently) the same three projects have held their place in the rotation for several years now.  At least back to the end of pre-pandemic times (if you can still remember those). 

So, here then are the three projects that I’ve been rotating between for seemingly forever now…

 

The Crimefighter’s Heist

There are a lot of superhero stories rolling around in my head, and very few of them are intended for comic books.  The Crimefighter’s Heist is one of many superhero novels that I’m hoping to write. 

Its protagonist is Milo Jasper.  Former Olympic-hopeful gymnast turned parkour expert turned skeleton themed masked crimefighter Jolly Roger. 

No actual powers, but just enough skills to get by.  Plus, he’s well liked by the majority of the crimefighter community. 

At the beginning of the novel, Milo is gossiping with another crimefighter (post chasing down a bad guy), and discovers that their friend and colleague Elven Red is facing a tragedy: his wife is dying, and only a very experimental and very, very expensive surgery has a chance at saving her.  But Elven Red has no medical insurance.  Not that insurance would even cover this radical surgery.  So his wife is going to die. 

This state of affairs is also discussed at the weekly poker game Milo attends.  The needed medical care (surgery + follow-up and whatnot) is said to run over a million dollars.  One of the other players muses that it’s too bad they aren’t all villains, then they could rob a bank to fund the surgery.  Another one laughs, and says that even as heroes, they could still rob the Villain’s Bank.  And everyone laughs.  Because the Villain’s Bank is just a myth.  A legitimate-on-paper financial institution that caters exclusively to the criminal element?  Yeah, right.  

But Milo is faking his laughter, because he knows a guy who knows a guy who swears that not only is the Villain’s Bank real, this guy know where it is.  And suddenly, robbing the Villain’s Bank doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea…

And that’s the set-up for a heist of insane proportions.  Milo assembles a heist crew from the ranks of the crimefighters (most of them with powers), does the necessary work to locate the actual bank, and allows a series of questionable decisions to be made in the planning stages that cause all sorts of interesting things to happen during the heist itself. 

Despite having been tinkering with this project off and on since 2009, I still don’t feel that I’ve got all of the kinks worked out of it.  Is a nine (or ten – I can never make up my mind) person crew too many for a bank heist?  How much backstory do I need to let the audience in on to make a world with superheroes believable?  And does this story take place in the same universe as any of my other unwritten superhero novels?  All sorts of things to work out. 

I will say that this project has one of my favorite characters, although sadly only in a minor supporting role.  A woman with the power to manipulate… chocolate.  (Much like a pyrokineticist manipulates fire.)  Who works as a chocolatier and wants absolutely nothing to do with the crimefighter community, despite having a crush on Milo.  A woman who is raising her younger brother, a teenager with an incredibly useful power that the community strongly desires.  She’s a lot of fun to think up storyline for. 

The Crimefighter’s Heist was intended to be a stand-alone novel.  But I’ve had it in mind for so long now that I know what happens to the characters after the novel ends, and well… IF I write it and IF it gets published and IF it ends up being successful enough that the publisher requests a sequel, I can definitely do that.  

Square One

I absolutely love the Urban Fantasy genre, and Square One was going to be how I made my name there. 

Over a decade before the story begins, our protagonist Jonathon Willoughby-Dawkins is befriended by a suicidal immortal, who passes on his immortality to Jon so that he can finally die.  By this point, Jon is already practicing spellcasting.  A kind of magical dilletante, he jumps from one type of magic to the next, learning what he can about that discipline’s sex-based magic before moving on. 

So when the story begins, Jon is the foremost practitioner of sex-based magic in the Pacific Northwest.  He cannot die or be killed, and that immortality can only leave him if he chooses to give it away. 

Jon’s best friend(-with-benefits), another practitioner known as Jones is killed, with all evidence pointing towards a succubus as the murderer.  Shortly after Jon begins investigating his friend’s murder, he runs into an infamous monster hunter named Patricia Bloom (a woman he’s aware of but has not previously met) who is hot on the trail of a succubus who has been traveling the country killing off practitioners. 

Jon and Patricia team up to hunt down the succubus, and along the way we get to see some of the stuff that Jon can do – including use one of his many magic tattoos to turn himself biologically female and back again.  They eventually find the succubus and kill it, and that night, Jon and Patricia fall into bed together. 

When Jon wakes up the next day, Patricia is gone.  As is his magic library.  All of his magic tools.  Even his tattoos are gone.  Worse yet, all knowledge and memory of casting spells has been wiped from his mind.  As has all memory of ever having had sex.  He finds himself back at square one. 

That’s the first quarter of the novel.  From there, it could go in a number of different directions as he realizes that he has to start his magic training all over again.  None of the ones I’ve tried really feel like the right direction, though. 

I’ve also never been able to make up my mind as to whether the sex scenes (and there will definitely be more than a few) should be spicy, erotic, or outright graphic. 

The story was originally to take place in Portland, but I have since relocated it to the fictional town of Nimbus, Oregon.  And Square One is intended to be the first in a series.  

Ship & Crew 4 Hire

When Ship & Crew 4 Hire started out in my brain, it was going to be a photographed LEGO webcomic.  Over time, things changed, and it ended up in its current incarnation, which is an outline for a prose work.  A prose work of ridiculous proportion. 

My current outline for Ship & Crew 4 Hire is 200 stories long.  And it seems to me that each of those stories would be ideally suited to the novella format.  So, anywhere from a quarter to half a novel apiece. 

I’m currently 51 years old, and in poor health.  Even if my writer’s block went away today, and I started working exclusively on this project, would I live long enough to finish it?  Yeah, I didn’t think so, either. 

But while it might not be practical as something I plan to write, it has been an excellent experimental project to just tinker around with. 

When the story starts there are four main characters.  Kerm Diamond, captain of the Astrochelonian, a martial arts expert and trouble-shooter who at the end of the first installment is severely downgraded in the galaxy-wide do-gooder organization the Whitelighters.  Hunter Red, a time- and reality-displaced super-heroine with super-strength, tracking powers, and an invisibility suit that got trapped in this reality chasing a villain through a portal.  Gorvon, a dinosauroid assigned by his planet as Kerm’s bodyguard, but in reality the ship’s engineer.  And the ship’s pilot Rorauk, a former Orc soldier who wants nothing more than to fly spaceships and go fishing.  There’s also Esses, a time-traveler who sometimes gets rides from physical place to place with the crew, joining them on their occasional adventure and vice-versa. 

With Kerm’s demotion in the Whitelighters comes a sizable reduction in how much fuel the group is willing to pay for, which leads the group to start taking on jobs to pay the bills. 

Lots of stuff happens.  (At 200 installments, one would certainly think so.)  They hire more crew, make some major enemies, discover a prophesy that changes Kerm’s life, develop a way of flying the ship inbetween realities, befriend a zillionaire who joins the crew for awhile, find themselves embroiled in a war, then later on a time war, then still later on a reality war.  (And that’s the very short version of the story.) 

Out of all the stories that I’m currently not writing, I think that not writing this one makes me the saddest.  I love these characters and would absolutely love to be bringing them to life on the page. 

The Current Rotation

As I said, for the past several years, those have been the three projects that I’ve worked on.  In addition to having writer’s block, I’ve also been stuck in a rut. 

Oh, I’m still coming up with new stories to tell, but for the most part, they’re all stories for later.  Not now.  Stories I plan to write “someday”.  Nothing I’m about to bump another project out of the rotation for.  Until earlier this year.  Over the course of a few months, I bumped not one, not two, but all three longstanding projects out of the rotation in favor of some new projects.  (Well, two new projects, and one older project that’s being revisited and reformatted.)  

Untitled Keith Nemsen Project

This will be a novel about the most prolific novelist in the world. 

I mentioned Keith Nemsen in my post on “Pseudonyms”, and to answer the question I posed there, I have decided that Nemsen is definitely my Kilgore Trout, not my Richard Bachman. 

In this project, Nemsen has a special power.  He can effectively stop time for everyone but himself.  (He discovers this ability as a teenager, and does all the things that a teenager would do with that power, but eventually remembers, “Oh yeah, morality,”)  He then buys himself an old manual typewriter and – in stopped time – writes a novel. 

He has lots of ideas for books, and begins spending more and more of his existence in stopped time.  Eventually he figures out that he can extend his field of flowing time out about three feet in front of him, which means he can use a laptop until the battery runs out. 

Eventually, he’s writing about twenty stoptime novels each full-flowing day.  Publishing them as ebooks online under a multitude of pseudonyms. 

Meanwhile, there’s a voracious reader out there who is a frequent customer at Nemsen’s website, and she has a theory that all of these books have the same author.  Realizing that no human could be producing that many books, she assumes that it’s an advanced Artificial Intelligence.  And being a huge computer nerd, sets out to track it down. 

Eventually, the two characters meet, and Nemsen is able to prove to her that yes, it actually is one person writing all those books.  More plot happens, and then they set off for Vegas with the intention of stealing some state of the art high-capacity batteries from a tradeshow so that Nemsen can power his laptop for longer stretches in stoptime. 

Eventually the normally isolated Nemsen realizes that he’s in love with her, and further realizes that he has to choose between his prolific writing alone in stoptime, or living an actual life outside of it.   

This is intended as a stand-alone novel.  

The Return of Captain Bison

I mentioned the remarkably similar sounding “The Return of Captain Buffalo” in my “Autobibliography” post.  That script for the first issue of a comic book was meant to be followed up by many, many more.  So I’ve decided to rewrite that script as the first part of a much larger novel. 

The story centers around the eponymous Captain Bison, a superhero who disappeared from the spotlight two years ago when he contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  But when one of his old enemies takes a shopping mall hostage with a suitcase nuke, and demands that Captain Bison come ‘out of hiding’ and face him, he ends up being pulled back into action (forcibly) by another superhero. 

The Captain gets a ride to the mall from the flying superhero that showed up at his apartment ranting about his responsibilities.  Having gained 200 lbs over the course of his illness, the old enemy doesn’t recognize the Captain for who he is until he says something only the two of them know. 

Their subsequent battle is short, and ends when the villain realizes that the Captain isn’t just fighting poorly, but specifically fighting suicidally.  Captain Bison came here with the intention of dying.  Realizing that the situation is far better than anything he could have ever hoped for, the villain disarms the nuke and makes his escape. 

The Captain’s ‘ride’ hadn’t gone far, and gets him out of the mall once the cops secure the abandoned nuke.  She asks what the Hell happened to him since his disappearance on their way back to his apartment, and he tells her that once he gets him back home, he’ll tell her the whole long boring story. 

That’s the short version of the script I wrote.  But as I said, there’s much more to the story that hasn’t yet been written.  When he gets back home, he crashes so hard from the exertion that it’s over a week before he fulfills his promise to tell his story.  And after hearing his story, the other hero feels guilty for pulling him back into it.  Especially when the Captain starts talking about not returning to his place outside of the superhero game. 

Deciding that he would be much better served being a mentor than an active superhero, she arranges a younger hero – a young adult woman called SecondSpot – to be his student.  The Captain accepts her as both student and sidekick, and begins investigating how his nemesis escaped from prison and where he got the nuke. 

Seeking the answers to these and other questions, the Captain begins accidentally accumulating a team of (mostly disabled) superheroes. 

As I’ve said in the past, the early parts of the Captain’s story are about as autobiographical as a work about super-powered people can get.  And given just how many stories I plotted out for these characters, this is definitely intended as the first novel in a series.  

Tales of Straumgate

I have a lot of unwritten stories that take place in my old D&D campaign world, the Esciem Realms.  (Including a big sprawling epic that occurs during the Second War of the Gods.)  Some of these projects have been frequent passengers on the rotation. 

But for the past couple of months, I’ve had a new fantasy mythos playground to roleplay in.  The metropolis of Straumgate. 

I first mentioned Straumgate in my “Pathfinder for One” post.  I needed an environment for an urban campaign, and so Straumgate was born.  Right now it is woefully underdeveloped.  Details are vague and sketchy.  There are no maps.  Just some lists and some one paragraph long plot ideas. 

But the more developed it gets, the more I realize that I’ve got stories to tell here, too.  Possibly some stories involving my clown vigilante characters, the Straumgate Cavalcade.  But I’ve got other characters in mind as well.  Some of whom were rejected or abandoned Pathfinder characters, some of which have occurred to me since I started building Straumgate in my head. 

I’m not sure of format yet.  I’m fairly certain this will be a serialized piece.  I plan to switch characters between stories, with several large crossover events along the way. 

But the whole thing starts off with a half-orc named Rukkas, who is the sole survivor of what was otherwise a ‘total party kill’.  Deciding that he’s not cut out for the adventuring life, he and his animal companion Keist (a large trained ape) head to Straumgate to sell off his old party’s gear and treasure, and use the money to start himself on a new path. 

After more plot happens, he ends up qualifying as a combatant in the arena, and slowly rises to fame as the battler “Ruckus”. 

Some of the other stories I’m planning to tell involve my Jekyll & Hyde character(s?) Hudson Hulman and her other side Mad Brutus.  A demon-blooded halfling fire mage.  A truly unlikely rogue intent on uniting Straumgate’s thieves’ guilds under one rule.  And of course, what kind of fantasy story would it be without a shapeshifted dragon?