New ideas in an old slush pile.
I signed up for NaNoWriMo last week. That means that during the month of November I must write a 50,000 word novel. One month. Thirty precious, unrecoverable days. This great ambition saddled me with a problem.
There's no problem in sitting down and banging keys. It's what I do all day. The problem was that when I signed up I didn't have any novel ideas.
(Sorry... couldn't help myself there.)
The two ideas that merged to form the book I'm finishing have been with me for a long time. The great idea that keeps interrupting me is going to have to wait because I'm not yet a good enough writer to bring it to life. So I needed an in-between idea. Something light that I wasn't totally committed to. An idea that I could date for a month but didn't have to marry.
I could think of only one place where I was confident I would find something to fit that description.
When we were cleaning out the garage last month, my wife discovered a copy paper box wedged up against a wall.
"You still have this?" she asked. I looked over from the pile of plastic totes I was stacking and smiled.
"HEY! My old idea box!"
My idea box was a place where I stored notes and outlines for stories when I was in college. I never got around to actually writing any of these, but I was so enamored with my own creativity that I couldn't let them go. For 17 years, I couldn't let them go.
"You know," said the wife, "Maybe it's about time to let some of these go."
"No!" I screamed, and ran over like a three-year-old to snatch my precious from her. "Mine!"
As I grabbed the box the bottom tore open. Pages, folders, and index cards fanned out across the floor. We were both impressed with the number of ideas I had created and forgotten about. What really captured our attention, though, was the shocking amount of roach droppings that littered the floor around them.
That's right, I said it. My idea box was full of crap. And what a metaphor it turned out to be.
I cleaned up and threw out the mess. Any salvageable notes went into a reusable grocery bag to be stored in my office until I had time to sort through them, probably in another 17 years. But then I signed up for NaNo and suddenly needed an easy idea quickly, leaving me with no choice but to turn to the old college idea box. There had to be something in there...right?
I dug through the slush pile, alternating between head shakes, laughter and facepalms as I revisited ideas that my 20-year-old self was convinced should be at the core of a prize-winning novel or a blockbuster screenplay.
Let's wade through the slush together, shall we?
Kindmilitarisch - Military dependents being implicated in a murder near a military base in Germany, a case of mistaken identity, and a love triangle. The girl is taken away because her family gets orders to move to a bases near a nuclear test site, where she dies. The boy is sad and travels with friends to London. Snoooooze.
Martians - In 1960, Sputnik 32 almost makes it to Mars when the radio dies. The three cosmonauts on board land the craft and explore the surface while having a philosophical debate about the nature of God and science. Then they all die. Next.
Love, Iron and the Rock - A bunch of friends live their boring lives and getting together to play basketball on the weekends. Politically correct multi-racial cast from all walks of life. I took a swig from a bottle of Pepto as one of the main characters died.
Death and Taxes - The plot was completely incomprehensible and had nothing to do with taxes. Plenty of death, though.
The Third Half - Lots of cards that went nowhere. The main character's sister dies. Another big philosophical discussion about God. I had a lot of inner conflict in college.
Rivets - Notes written on drawing paper and hotel memo pad sheets. Handwriting totally illegible. What's missing? Oh, there it is: the main character dies.
The B+ Student - I couldn't follow these notes at all, but I did make it to the part near the end where I wrote: "She takes off and gets smashed by a truck and dies." Oh my gosh.
Ice Hammer - I remember being proud of the names of my two main characters, a couple of police detectives named Helga Ingersoll and Jim Goodblood. They track a killer who uses blunt objects to murder his victims. The twist: the murder weapons are all carved from ice so they melt and there's never any evidence of their existence. In the end the killer dies, but Helga and Jim survive. There are some notes in this folder for a follow-up story called Orange Blossom Trail. I should have followed up on this... it seems like it had potential.
The Full Llama - A card of notes about a researcher who discovers a secret religion practiced at the top of the Earth. Accompanying the card are a bunch of cards from a game of Balderdash played in my apartment. My favorite entry: "Drapetomania - The unhealthy obsession over window treatments." No one died here except my integrity.
Star Killer - Tiny handwriting on half sheets. An amateur sleuth solves a crime but the perpetrator has planted a second set of evidence to point to the sleuth. Needless to say, the sleuth dies.
The Gifted Class - A horror story about a class of evil genius kindergarteners who plot against their teacher. She dies. Shocker.
Old Chad - A haunted house story where the characters die one by one. Oh. My. Goodness.
Sandman - This one started with potential but turned into a Lifetime move by the end. I can even picture the card telling the rest of the story before the credits start rolling. No one (important) dies, but the main character does get his leg sliced off in a horrific taxicab accident.
The Dish - There are a lot of notes various colors, sizes and types of paper. I really liked this story and didn't realize until looking through this folder that I used part of this plot in my Serealities job. It was a short story with a horrific twist. A young executive with a lot of drive works her way up the ladder, doing devious things to move from level to level within her organization. Eventually she's welcomed into the inner circle of the company and is invited to a special banquet where the male leadership of the company applaud her and she discovers that she is on the menu. In short, she dies.
Close Enough for Government Work - A short story where the government creates a billion dollar spider-like assassination device to take out a dissident. In the end, the device is knocked off of the ceiling by an actual spider, lands in the toilet, and short-circuits when the target pees on it. Miraculously, everyone survives.
Dorisur - This one is very cool and has a lot of potential. It actually is the first job I did for someone, as my friend Dave (from the Pinball Sex Machine story) needed some original material for the comic book pages that he was producing for his senior project. My compensation was a copy of the pages, which were brilliant. To see his current projects check out his company, Creaturebox. He loved it, I loved it, and you would love it, but as it was a joint venture I won't elaborate unless he and I were to revisit it together.
Calvin's Letter - A stack of notecards, pages of details, and a typed short screenplay. Upon further examination, the only thing missing is Calvin, a letter, and a plot.
The Sadness of Jeremy Jensen - Oh, gag. I can illustrate the quality of this drek with a single line from the notes: "During the prank the kid falls down a twenty-foot ravine and breaks his neck on a rock."
I can say that other than The Dish and Dorisur, none of these stories would ever make it on to my monitor today. But I'm happy that I kept them. In some weird way I feel like I'm honoring the optimistic, ambitious, starry-eyed 20-year-old me by doing so.
There's no problem in sitting down and banging keys. It's what I do all day. The problem was that when I signed up I didn't have any novel ideas.
(Sorry... couldn't help myself there.)
The two ideas that merged to form the book I'm finishing have been with me for a long time. The great idea that keeps interrupting me is going to have to wait because I'm not yet a good enough writer to bring it to life. So I needed an in-between idea. Something light that I wasn't totally committed to. An idea that I could date for a month but didn't have to marry.
I could think of only one place where I was confident I would find something to fit that description.
When we were cleaning out the garage last month, my wife discovered a copy paper box wedged up against a wall.
"You still have this?" she asked. I looked over from the pile of plastic totes I was stacking and smiled.
"HEY! My old idea box!"
My idea box was a place where I stored notes and outlines for stories when I was in college. I never got around to actually writing any of these, but I was so enamored with my own creativity that I couldn't let them go. For 17 years, I couldn't let them go.
"You know," said the wife, "Maybe it's about time to let some of these go."
"No!" I screamed, and ran over like a three-year-old to snatch my precious from her. "Mine!"
As I grabbed the box the bottom tore open. Pages, folders, and index cards fanned out across the floor. We were both impressed with the number of ideas I had created and forgotten about. What really captured our attention, though, was the shocking amount of roach droppings that littered the floor around them.
That's right, I said it. My idea box was full of crap. And what a metaphor it turned out to be.
I cleaned up and threw out the mess. Any salvageable notes went into a reusable grocery bag to be stored in my office until I had time to sort through them, probably in another 17 years. But then I signed up for NaNo and suddenly needed an easy idea quickly, leaving me with no choice but to turn to the old college idea box. There had to be something in there...right?
I dug through the slush pile, alternating between head shakes, laughter and facepalms as I revisited ideas that my 20-year-old self was convinced should be at the core of a prize-winning novel or a blockbuster screenplay.
Let's wade through the slush together, shall we?
Kindmilitarisch - Military dependents being implicated in a murder near a military base in Germany, a case of mistaken identity, and a love triangle. The girl is taken away because her family gets orders to move to a bases near a nuclear test site, where she dies. The boy is sad and travels with friends to London. Snoooooze.
Martians - In 1960, Sputnik 32 almost makes it to Mars when the radio dies. The three cosmonauts on board land the craft and explore the surface while having a philosophical debate about the nature of God and science. Then they all die. Next.
Love, Iron and the Rock - A bunch of friends live their boring lives and getting together to play basketball on the weekends. Politically correct multi-racial cast from all walks of life. I took a swig from a bottle of Pepto as one of the main characters died.
Death and Taxes - The plot was completely incomprehensible and had nothing to do with taxes. Plenty of death, though.
The Third Half - Lots of cards that went nowhere. The main character's sister dies. Another big philosophical discussion about God. I had a lot of inner conflict in college.
Rivets - Notes written on drawing paper and hotel memo pad sheets. Handwriting totally illegible. What's missing? Oh, there it is: the main character dies.
The B+ Student - I couldn't follow these notes at all, but I did make it to the part near the end where I wrote: "She takes off and gets smashed by a truck and dies." Oh my gosh.
Ice Hammer - I remember being proud of the names of my two main characters, a couple of police detectives named Helga Ingersoll and Jim Goodblood. They track a killer who uses blunt objects to murder his victims. The twist: the murder weapons are all carved from ice so they melt and there's never any evidence of their existence. In the end the killer dies, but Helga and Jim survive. There are some notes in this folder for a follow-up story called Orange Blossom Trail. I should have followed up on this... it seems like it had potential.
The Full Llama - A card of notes about a researcher who discovers a secret religion practiced at the top of the Earth. Accompanying the card are a bunch of cards from a game of Balderdash played in my apartment. My favorite entry: "Drapetomania - The unhealthy obsession over window treatments." No one died here except my integrity.
Star Killer - Tiny handwriting on half sheets. An amateur sleuth solves a crime but the perpetrator has planted a second set of evidence to point to the sleuth. Needless to say, the sleuth dies.
The Gifted Class - A horror story about a class of evil genius kindergarteners who plot against their teacher. She dies. Shocker.
Old Chad - A haunted house story where the characters die one by one. Oh. My. Goodness.
Sandman - This one started with potential but turned into a Lifetime move by the end. I can even picture the card telling the rest of the story before the credits start rolling. No one (important) dies, but the main character does get his leg sliced off in a horrific taxicab accident.
The Dish - There are a lot of notes various colors, sizes and types of paper. I really liked this story and didn't realize until looking through this folder that I used part of this plot in my Serealities job. It was a short story with a horrific twist. A young executive with a lot of drive works her way up the ladder, doing devious things to move from level to level within her organization. Eventually she's welcomed into the inner circle of the company and is invited to a special banquet where the male leadership of the company applaud her and she discovers that she is on the menu. In short, she dies.
Close Enough for Government Work - A short story where the government creates a billion dollar spider-like assassination device to take out a dissident. In the end, the device is knocked off of the ceiling by an actual spider, lands in the toilet, and short-circuits when the target pees on it. Miraculously, everyone survives.
Dorisur - This one is very cool and has a lot of potential. It actually is the first job I did for someone, as my friend Dave (from the Pinball Sex Machine story) needed some original material for the comic book pages that he was producing for his senior project. My compensation was a copy of the pages, which were brilliant. To see his current projects check out his company, Creaturebox. He loved it, I loved it, and you would love it, but as it was a joint venture I won't elaborate unless he and I were to revisit it together.
Calvin's Letter - A stack of notecards, pages of details, and a typed short screenplay. Upon further examination, the only thing missing is Calvin, a letter, and a plot.
The Sadness of Jeremy Jensen - Oh, gag. I can illustrate the quality of this drek with a single line from the notes: "During the prank the kid falls down a twenty-foot ravine and breaks his neck on a rock."
I can say that other than The Dish and Dorisur, none of these stories would ever make it on to my monitor today. But I'm happy that I kept them. In some weird way I feel like I'm honoring the optimistic, ambitious, starry-eyed 20-year-old me by doing so.
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