What to write next?

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I’ve just finished the first draft of another Valentine Divergence story, and a month ago I finished another fantasy novel. I’m probably going to start something new soon, and I wondered if my readers might have a strong preference among the story ideas I’m considering:

1. A portal fantasy, where the portal changes a person’s sex when they pass through it and maybe transforms them in other ways (I haven’t worked out all the details of the setting yet).

2. A story about a superhero who cocoons and metamorphoses every winter, emerging in Spring with a different body and different powers.

3. A sixth Nat Holcomb story. Possibly the final story about her.

4a. A third Kazmina & Launuru story, a direct sequel to “When Wasps Make Honey”.

4b. Or a prequel about Kazmina’s father Znembalan, set when Kazmina was a little girl.

5. A story about people who are transformed to replace the deceased children of rich people.

6. A world where Dr. Jekyll’s invention is rediscovered, and becomes a popular recreational drug in the 1960s; everyone who tries it gets a different transformation and personality change while under its influence.

7. A story about one of those reality-altering mages that Bill Hart and The Professor like to write about, who has a limited range — a few hundred or thousand miles. Someone who’s traveled outside their range while they made their changes and then come back will notice them, and get freaked out, and become a target of new changes.

8. A couple of different stories in the yin-yang magic setting I outlined in an email to the tg_fiction mailing list a few months ago: magical devices are powered by yin and yang energy, transported to homes and businesses via magical conduits from power plants where it's drained from slaughtered livestock. Spills and leaks of yin or yang can have unfortunate consequences like an electrocution, an oil spill, or a nuclear power plant meltdown.

9. A story vaguely inspired by “Days of Future Past” where someone goes back in time aiming to become their own younger self, but accidentally winds up in someone else’s body and further back in time than they intended. Urban fantasy, not superheroes.

10. A space probe that’s terraforming a planet and building new bodies for the stored minds of its uploaded colonists. The AI decides that a 50/50 sex ratio is inefficient for a new colony and decides to put most of the male minds in female bodies as well.

11a. A couple of Twisted stories: one is loosely inspired by Orphan Black, with clones of a first-generation Twisted being studied to see if there’s any common pattern in how and when they Twist.

11b. Or a sequel to “Twisted Throwback,” following up on Emily’s uncle Jack and cousin Tim.

12. An RPG portal fantasy, with players becoming their characters; with a unique twist to hopefully set it apart from all the dozens of other such stories: it happens all at once to every group of RPG players in the world, as well as to stage and film actors.
Edited 2014/12/9: I've written this one as a 12,000 word novelette. Any volunteers to beta read it?

13. A colonizing probe that copies the colonist’s minds into the bodies of local sentient beings.

14. Well-intentioned aliens try to help Earth’s transsexuals by creating a nanite plague that will transform everyone with gender dysphoria. But they don’t understand human brains as well as they think and there are some false negatives and false positives...

15. A prequel to “Quarantine Cove”, about the Masters abducting people from Earth and their human slaves revolting.

16. More stories in the “Creative Commons Souls” setting.

17. A sequel to “The Family that Plays Together”, several years later when Leslie and Taylor are in college, and the worlds have drawn closer together.

Let me know which of those sound most interesting to you.

Comments

12 might be a problem if the

12 might be a problem if the person is in more than one game or does more than one acting/performing job. Of course, they could just get an amalgamation of characters/roles.

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Yep..12

12 sounds fun.

14 could be good too. Maybe the aliens don't understand gender and think that males are broken due to their XY chromosome. They release the "fix" as a gesture of good will.

-- Sleethr

I seem to recall number 2

I seem to recall number 2 being done in another story. I just can't remember details about it. The character would fall asleep for X amount of time, then wake up with changes. When it started to happen, they'd use amphetamines to stay awake and ward off the change, but that would then make the next one more extreme. (if anyone else remembers it, I'd appreciate looking it back up)

Thinking about it - it might have been one of the Wild Cards books.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

The Sleeper

Gr8tS4g3's picture

The character you are thinking of is The Sleeper - Croyd Cranson, who would somehow reinfect himself with Xenovirus Takis-A whenever he slept and was terrified of one day drawing The Black Queen so he had an extreme fear of sleeping, he popped Amphetamines to stay awake, then go into Amphetamine psychosis and run amok before conking out, he was a very cool character but tragic and screwed up as well.

The Nature of Monkey is Irrepressible!

Thanks! I take it you had

Thanks! I take it you had the book on the shelf?


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Next Story

Alien nanite plague! I know some people I'd hope it worked on, just for a little payback.

Oh, and here's my arm, inject away!!

Hugs and Blessings,
Beth

PS let me know if you decide not to use it. I might be looking for my next project soon.

You're welcome

Anyone is welcome to use any of these story ideas. I'm not likely to ever write more than a fraction of them -- by the time I write three or four of these, I'll undoubtedly come up with several other ideas that will be newer and shinier -- and even if we write from the same idea, we're sure to write very different stories.

12

Sadarsa's picture

Personally im a big fan of 12.. lotta people say it's overdone or something... but then you look back. Most of those stories were never finished at all- especially the D&D one's... i cant think of one off hand that's actually compleated.

~Your only Limitation is your Imagination~

Completed RPG portal fantasies

#12 seems to be getting more love than any other on the list, so it will probably be one of the next two or three stories I write, if not the very next one. I need to do some more outlining and plotting before I write it, so I might write another one that I have clearer ideas about first.

As for completed RPG portal fantasies, three come to mind offhand: "The Gate to Aragnatha" by Lynn LeFey (on FM, quite good, I just re-read it for the third time a few months ago), "Heroes of Justice" by Grover here on BC (also excellent), and "Mythology" by Eddie Glover (on FM, not very good but it is finished). There certainly are a fair number of unfinished and possibly abandoned ones, too, like Bek Corbin's "Foxglove" and Sleethr's "Reality Storm".

Another

There was also another whose title and author I can't recall, though I think it was posted here; it involved a multi-player computer RPG, and the viewpoint character kept getting more and more feminine every time they played a game session until they became entirely a girl. It ended with the players being recruited by the gods who ran the game for a longer campaign in that world, without the frequent return visits to their own world that they'd had while playing the computer game. Can anyone remember the title and author?

I've gone ahead and started writing #12, and it's flowing well so far at over 4600 words the first day. I'm now getting into less charted territory where my plot outline is vaguer so I'll undoubtedly slow down soon, but hopefully I won't get stuck; I think this will work out to be a long novelette or short novella.

I do know the one you're

I do know the one you're talking about -and if I recall correctly, it was _two_ of the main characters that were going female. The 'game' was apparently built by Odin as a filter.

I can't remember the name or author myself.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

They all sound great ideas,

They all sound great ideas, but if I had to pick which sunds most intrestinf to read I'd say number 17.

Finished first draft of #12

I've written a 12,000 word novelette in setting #12. (I think it's the longest story I've ever written in three days.) Any volunteers to beta read it? Or for those who voted for #12, what's your second-place choice? I may write others in this setting at some point, but not right away.

Option 12

I actually started writing a story once (sorry, didn't finish it so I didn't post it) which was the inverse of #12. In it, another world had fallen to darkness and the bad guys had almost taken over the entire world, but the last bastion of good (on a chain of islands far out to sea) cast a city-wide spell to cause their souls to escape to another dimension before the bad guys could build a fleet large enough to invade.

Going forward - all these souls incarnated into new bodies on earth. Memories of the previous world and struggle half-remembered in dreams led to a highly successful MMORPG.

Years later, the bad guys (who had figured out what happened quickly, but took a long time to figure out how to make it physically) opened a portal to Earth. Magic rushed through, restoring the memories of that previous life in the small percentage of the Earth's populace whose souls had come from that alternate world. Simultaneously, the magic flooding into the world "rebooted" magical processes on Earth shut down millennia ago, and thus magic on Earth became self-sustaining.

People didn't change into their previous forms, but use of certain magical powers (mainly healing or physical augmentation) could cause a person's body over time to take on aspects of the previous, more magically powerful bodies.

Anyone else is free to run with the idea if it appeals.