New Short Story Idea #5

Working Title: "Roulette"

Genre: No idea. Literary?

Main Characters: Cherise, a new chef at Roulette who's quite nervous about her job, although she's a perfectly good gourmet chef already.
Ronald, one of the well-established chefs of the restaurant and (secretly) the one who will poison meals at random, and not necessarily the ones he makes.
Jones, a frequent customer at the restaurant who brought his girlfriend Dinah along this time.

Setting: The kitchen and main dining area of the Roulette restaurant, modern-day-ish. The restaurant serves gourmet food for free, but on occasion, a random meal will be poisoned. Generally, the poisons are matched with foods that will mask the particular flavor or scent. The toxins also range from near-instant death to mild food poisoning.

Plot: Cherise works her first day at the restaurant, while Ronald and Jones do their normal things.

Point of View: Third-person, omniscient.

New Short Story Idea #5

Working Title: "I Am a Professional"

Genre: Mainstream?

Main Characters: Anne, the local medical examiner. Short in stature, and in her forties, she tends to take things solemnly to the point of seeming ambivalent.

A.S., an assassin-for-hire. Although he's not universally attractive, he is a bit of a charmer and tends to communicate with clients and others alike with cordiality.

Yvette, a funeral singer. She's rather thick but tall enough to even it out. She and her group have sung at many funerals, but she only seems immune to the sorrow until she's out of the building.
Herbert, the victim and the epitome of a good Christian man. Those who knew him can't fathom why anyone would murder him. (There was a logical, if heartless, reason for his murder.)

Setting: Modern-day, somewhere in America. All takes place in the same town, aside from perhaps a few musings from A.S.

Plot: Anne, A.S., and Yvette reflect on the meaning of professionality in the face of such a tragedy. Anne is trying to help solve the homicide case; A.S. is clearing the area; Yvette is waiting through the eulogies for her second round of songs at the end of the funeral.

Point of View: Third-person, limited to each of the main three in different sections.

New Short Story Idea #4

I considered doing this for the Writer's Digest genre short story competition, but I don't think I'll have a decent version out in time for the due date. At any rate, it doesn't feel like it has enough to it to be a whole novel.

Working Title: "Communications Breakdown"

Genre: Sci-Fi

Main Characters: Tommus Richards, a 24-year-old black man who is appropriately full of himself. He is a world-famous runner (anyone could guess from his physique alone) and loves it. He can be rather greedy, and he'll look down on others often, but he's not always offensive. He abandoned the long-running family business for his current career and, as a result, has been estranged from the rest of the family.
Phil, the antagonist. More greedy than Tommus, he's rather slippery and unafraid to take risks, whether they involve him or someone else.

Setting: Future Earth's largest hospital. The size of a city, it demands a large workforce and a multilayered communication system. It consists of several futuristic buildings as well as some outdoor space.

Plot: Tommus is lounging in his summer mansion waiting for the next competition in a month or so when there's a knock at his door. The man there informs him that somehow the entire hospital communication system has crashed, and they're in desperate need of some people to help get information from one place to another fast. Figuring it could be a decent training opportunity, Tommus agrees to volunteer a bit, and it's all fun and games until he starts to stumble upon clues that the shutdown wasn't an accident and just how much money Phil could get if a few delayed messages lead to deaths.

Point of View: First person (Tommus).

New Short Story Idea #3

This was first going to be a story idea, but then it decided to be set in the Macbay-verse, so I felt it would work better as a short story tie-in.

Title: Thrill

Genre: Steampunk

Main Characters: Anthony, the seventeen-year-old son of Max Webb. Quite tall, he's a thin sort of muscular with oddly long fingers. He has straight, near-black hair he keeps spiked, and hazel eyes. He's attractive enough to have a few girls after him, and the distant/bad boy attitude helps. He doesn't speak or smile often, but he very much enjoys steambike racing.
Maude, a sixteen-year-old girl with shoulder-length, wavy, blonde hair. She's a bit of a fangirl when it comes to Anthony, although she's rather calm about it (enough so to gain some respect from him).
Fenton, Anthony's older brother. He's much more social than his brother and hasn't spent much time with him since Anthony started distancing himself.

Setting: Ten years after Macbay Transportation Services, in the same universe (specifically Central City). Steambike races are a huge form of entertainment, helped by the fact there are a lot of crashes on the hugely-banked tracks (and no effective brakes).

Plot: Anthony rides the race circuit in spite of the risk to his life. Maude tries to set him straight, but Anthony's family shame-based suicidal tendencies aren't an easy barrier to break.

Point of View: Third person, limited to Anthony.

New Short Story Idea #2

I've had this idea for a while, but I've just never gotten around to writing it. Was reminded of it in Genetics Monday morning.

Working Title: "Apoptosis"

Genre: ...Is Suicide a genre? Maybe Horror, with a touch of Mystery.

Main Characters: Gwen, an 18-year-old female with short, orange hair that was normally well-kept. She was a freshman, preparing for a pre-medical degree of some sort. She was book-smart, but not very good with relationships.
Claire, Gwen's 20-year-old sister. She has reddish-brown hair, shoulder length, and is certainly "the pretty one" of her family. She can be a bit of a ditz, but she's willing to make friends with just about anyone, despite the toll it takes on her time.
Herman, a 29-year-old male officer. He's a bit big but in-shape. He's not an emotional man and just wants to do his job.

Setting: Gwen's bedroom, in modern-day America or something. The story format alternates between Gwen in that room, hovering over a Cell Biology textbook, and Claire and Herman standing there the next day.

Plot: A morbidly-depressed Gwen is studying for a big exam she "knows" she won't pass when she finally commits suicide, which she has been contemplating for months. She is found in dead her room the next day, and Claire and Herman investigate the scene.

Point of View: Alternates between first-person from Gwen, describing the process of apoptosis (programmed cell suicide), and third-person from Claire, who describes to Herman how Gwen had been faring as of late, in parallel with the processes Gwen describes in her sections.

After reading Seven Pieces of Chalk, I don't feel like I could do any suicide stories more justice, but I'd still like to toy with this someday. It seems like an interesting format to me.

New Short Story Idea #1

I'm really not much of a short story person. I've certainly done oneshots before, but always as accompaniment to some larger whole, usually something like the Brutal series. This is one idea that struck me, though, that I couldn't do in a whole novel. We'll see if it ever happens.

Title: "That We May Live" (could be changed)

Genre: Romance, I think

Main Characters: Annie Bernard, a young woman with boy-short black hair and a general attractiveness about her.
Phillip Durham, a young man with short brown hair that's rather scrawny.

Setting: Modern-day America during Veterans' Day.

Plot: Annie visits the grave of her grandfather, a war veteran. She decorates the headstone with flowers and prepares to plant a small flag, but she loses her grip, and the flag blows to the next plot, an empty one. Phillip, visiting his aunt's grave for similar reasons, is at the next plot and manages to catch the flag before it can go any further. He hands it back to Annie, who thanks him. The two strike up some patriotic conversation about being blessed with the people who fight and die that they might live. As Annie starts back for her grandfather's plot, Phillip stops her for a moment and, apologising if it sounded callous but bringing up the point of their being able to live, asks for her number.
It ends after skipping to some time later. The empty plot is now marked with headstones for Annie and Phillip Durham.

Point of View: Third person, static or omniscient.

Inspired by visiting an ancestor's grave that by some strange coincidence was two plots (one empty) away from ancestors on the other side of the family.