So…
A pair of identity thieves team up with a ex-spook and a weird civil servant to investigate a serious identity fraud racket and uncover a plot that could shut down several major banks and shake the government. Hmm. It’s a bit like Hustle meets Spooks with a dash of Capital City (remember that, shoulder-pad fans?) An interesting but not very original idea for a TV drama script. Losing faith in that one at the moment.
Global aggression by a British Empire fueled by a wonder chemical that can heal injuries and reverse aging forces Depression-era America to act: invade or be subsumed. A novel idea that I’ve done quite a bit of work on but is going to require shedloads of research because I want it to be plausibly authentic. Still liking that one but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
A house full lodgers who all seem to do the same kind of job (something very stressful and occasionally disturbing, although we never discover quite what) find ever more bizarre ways of taking their minds off the horror of everyday life. An idea for a black comedy on TV, although it might work as a play. Very early days on that one, but I’ve got some strong visuals floating around my mind, particularly the Gary Numan theme dinner every Thursday evening. Darkly funny and utterly tragic in turns.
The last asylum for the insane, where we’re never quite sure who are the doctors and who are the patients; an island of weirdness, a forgotten tributary of the NHS, a kingdom without a king. Gormenghastesque in baroque complexity, the asylum building itself is the real star of the show. Most likely a novel but it’d be grand as a film script. Course, it’d never get made, not unless a crew with a Red One camera and a bunch of volunteer actors were willing to spend six months in abandoned Cane Hill Hospital.
A story of constant mega super turbo hyper action, where it’s constantly one thing after another; a car chase ends in a big crash which knocks over a crane which hits a boat which sinks which dislodges a mine which floats to the surface which bumps into a dock which explodes which hurls a shard of wood into the window of an office which kills a robber who was holding up some workers who then flee and so on. Unrelenting. Constant. Page after page. Zero characterisation. Just stuff. Probably get very boring after a while, but good for a giggle. Make an excellent no-brainer movie. It’d make Speed look Slow.
The hero (anti-hero?) of Zero Sum takes revenge on a crooked financial adviser who has been loan sharking the poor and needy just to supplement his gadget shopping addiction (he’s got a house full of flat screen TVs, sunbeds, exercise bikes, mobile phones, DVD players, the lot). The revenge? I won’t tell you the end, ‘cos I’m planning to write this one as a short story sometime soon. It’s a laugh, though.
The birth of an artificial intelligence as experienced by the AI itself, trapped unknowingly inside its own developing mind. In this story AIs are born slowly. They take some months to achieve self-realisation. Not all of them achieve it. This AI wakes up as a small child laying naked in the sunlit hallway of an large, empty house. The fact that it’s the birth of an AI is kind of irrelevant. It’s just another way of growing up, but condensed in time compared to the growth of the human mind. A novel, this one. Had the idea several weeks ago. Still like it, but I don’t have the full story yet.
A timid, lonely misfit of a man comes across a bundle of poorly photocopied papers. They purport to be the answer to all his problems; how to become confident, handsome, interesting; how to attract sexual partners, become wealthy, powerful. He takes it home then forgets about it. Then he is badly affected by…well, let’s say something bad happens to him. It comes down to fight or flight. In his darkest moments he rediscovers it and in desperation begins to follow the instructions. Everything changes, very quickly. A novel, but one for the future. The ingredients are on the shopping list but I haven’t been to the shops to see if they’re on the shelf.
Here’s the opening paragraph of a story:
Two trading scouts, their fiscal month’s tour complete, took lodgings for a night or two above a public house in Seahill-neath-Sky before commencing their return journey to the City and the interminable rounds of bureaucracy that would entail. The hostelry was occupied the live long day by never less than five horny-handed sons of the soil, each one sucking pungent tobacco fumes from unfeasibly long-stemmed clay pipes. They would compete in their gentle, underspoken way; jousting with one another ‘pon the height of their crop, the richness of the loam from which it sprang or – if no other agricultural criterion presented itself – the length and quality of their pipes. They all but ignored the trading scouts, who had taken up position either side of a small rickety table in the space created by the bay window at the front of the property. After all, once you have sold a yield to a scout in return for credit on your account there’s barely anything else you want to say to him.
This one I’ve been chewing over for a while. I have a feel for this world and the characters that live in it, but I don’t know what the story is. Perhaps this is the one I’ll choose to do a Cannery Row on; just open the pages and let the characters write their own stories. I’m no Steinbeck – far, far from it – but I love the idea of just writing for writing’s sake and not caring one jot for plot development or any of that bunk. I have considered building a novel bit by bit right here in the blog, all on one page. This might be the story I do that with.
A man wakes in a sumptuous bedroom and discovers he is in the centre of a royal city that occupies an entire island. He doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from. He remembers nothing beyond the last few hours. This island is in a world that is mostly water. There are many other islands; each one is entirely covered by a habitation of some sort, from tiny ramshackle villages to grand cities. Each city has a cultural status. It is the innate objective of all inhabitants of this work to try to make their way from one island to the next, gaining cultural status and importance as they go. Many never even leave the island of their birth. The ultimate disgrace is to have to move down an island. Each time someone moves from one island to the next they must renew their identity, taking a new name and a new role in life. A novel. An idea from long back that I haven’t really spend any time developing. A bit Iain M. Banks, which is no bad thing but I hate the idea of just copying.
That’s it at the moment. I’ve got a few other notes and ideas but they’re either too disjointed to make a single coherent paragraph out of, or I have discarded them completely for one reason or another. One idea for a novel that I’d nurtured for years got blown out of the water when Heroes hit the screens. Bah humbug.
Right. All these ideas and stuff above are mine, my copyright. Don’t copy them, steal them or appropriate them in any other way. Mine. Mine mine mine. For what it’s worth.
