We've been in the midst of a horrific heat wave that seems (*knock on wood*) to have finally broken today. During the heat wave, I was all over the place, both physically and mentally. My house is an impossible building to occupy once the heat and humidity get oppressive, so I escaped to libraries, museums, my granparents' cottage up north, and my friend's air conditioned house as frequently as possible the past week. I was also all over the place mentally. Focusing on anything in that weather is just impossible, but heat-induced delirium can occasionally lead to interesting ideas that may grow into bigger things now that it's cool enough to focus on stuff. In no particular order:
- Childhood friends/brothers who had adventures in a fantasy world return to that world as adults and discover that the world has become corrupted and overgown. Their fantasy world is for all intents and purposes conquered, and those forces threaten to spill over into ours.
- I envisioned this world as being united by a magical forest, mainly because I spend so much time wandering around a nearby forest looking for ideas, but also because I could envision lots of cool ways for the forest to 'conquer' the civilized parts of the world. There's also some nifty potential for the transition between our world and the otherworld to not be distinct, like the kids were just wandering through the woods and wound up in the other world without it being immediately clear where one began and the other ended.
- How come hyper-intelligent, super-advanced civilizations are only ever portrayed as really serious about everything with only one or two exceptions (e.g. Q, the Doctor and the Master). It seems like there would be some trolls (in the internet sense of the word) along the way. Perhaps a little more primitive than the examples above. I mean, if most humans were omnipotent and could run around time and space, I bet they'd fuck around with most of the 'primitive' life they might run across. Maybe it's just a transitional phase or whatever. I'm also thinking about the old mythological gods (through the lens of Clarke's Third Law). They were always sticking their fingers in things (and, in a more literal sense, other appendages...). I want to see more nigh-omnipotent trolls in Sci-Fi and fantasy.
- "Hey! Check it out! The 'intelligent life' on this planet hasn't even calculated the last digit of π yet, and he's one of the 'smart ones'."
- What went wrong with One More Day (the Spiderman arc in which they rewrote history so that he was never married to Mary Jane, never revealed his identity during the Civil War, and Aunt May never took a bullet for him), at a thematic level, was that it took away the notion that being a superhero has consequences, and that you're not the only one that your behavior puts at risk. Could be interesting to play around with heroes who have to live with the consequences of their actions, as well as those who can't handle that responsibility and thus refuse the call.
- Beginning the physical act of drawing, writing etc. reveals details that you can't know until you attempt the actual creation.
- This one occurred to me while at my grandparents' cabin, and I grabbed a stick and started drawing the fire in the dirt.
- I keep coming back to this as an interesting seed for a magic system in a fantasy story, tying magic to artistic expression and figuring out what you learn from different types of creation and how that might affect the magic cast.
- For example, drawing, sculpting anything directly representational requires you to notice and understand and (as a magic spell) alter the physical characteristics of things. Magic based on music or poetry, alternatively, could be something more along the lines of large-scale emotional manipulation.
- "Poetry by Coersion", "Surprised by Lasers"
- I'm also thinking in the near future (once I stop feeling guilty about how the heat forced me away from 3D work, and/or finish my various personal 3D projects) I'll be taking another stab at a revision of my first posted story The Preacher and the Parasite. I got some partial drafts of a prequel of sorts, describing how the Preacher wound up attached to the Parasite, but I kept hitting various walls, and I've come to the conclusion that part of why so many prequels fall flat is that they're forced to shoehorn in drama that didn't previously exist or being forced to compress a bunch of potentially interesting plot points into a much smaller period of time. I don't think the prequel attempts are a complete waste, however, as they'll work rather well into the various flashback dreams that the Preacher has during the course of the original story.
