A Story-Making Game

This requires some technology, so not everyone may be able to do it easily, but...

Start up your method for listening to music. Put it on shuffle. Play (or at least start and write down) the next two songs it gives you.

Make a story out of them.

The story must get elements from both songs, but it doesn't matter what part of which song—the chorus, the title, the music video, even just the feel of the tune. The story can be as simple or as detailed as you feel the need to write down.

Of course, I can't demand you do something I haven't myself done, so here's a few from me.

1. "Youth Gone Wild" and "Don't Stop Believing"

A small-town girl gets more than she had bargained for when her aimless train ride is hijacked by a group of punks. But when she manages to escape into the heart of the dreary, superficially bustling city, she finds herself drawn back to the car. Between one of the young men who might not be as dastardly as he seems and the hope of negotiating the train to greener pastures, she might stay awhile.

2. "In the Air Tonight" and "Still They Ride"

Before The Generic Momentous Event, the town had been calm and Jesse a good man. But with the streets in shambles, half the population dead, and pyrokinetic gangs seizing power, quiet safety is impossible. The former nurse would have left altogether had it not been for one other man—an influential fire-thrower who killed Jesse's son in the chaos. Jesse wants his revenge before he dares flee the boundaries of the town, even if he has to team up with some unsavory characters to do so.

3. "Share the Land" and "Juke Box Hero"

The manager of a rising rock star struggles to keep up with her job and the world around her while hiding her drug addiction, which is only worsened by her occasional visions of her loving but deceased fiancé.

4. "Dead or Alive" and "Psycho Killer"

A charming professional spy with a lot of kills in his résumé has to secure information from a young woman. It seems simple enough until he finds that she is unwilling to communicate with a human like him, and her own history of killings spells its own kind of trouble.

Fun enough, right? Tell me if you come up with anything interesting. Maybe you can even pair your results with a character from an earlier little game and get a fuller story.

Fragments VIII

Insert a witty seven word phrase here

• A character with Redd White's speech pattern (it's ridiculously fun to write, although it takes a lot of thesaurus time)
• A character with a severed corpus collosum
• An REM behaviour disorder episode or two being a major plot point
• Someone trying to repay a large, literal debt in an interesting fashion
• A video game storyline
• The one fellow from school who is always wearing headphones and singing along loudly to music regardless of where he is or who else is present (he also has a girlfriend who isn't much taller than her guitar)
• The protagonist has actually set up the entire injustice behind his/her quest just for the chance to actually save someone in a significant way
• The phrase "sugar and brain juice" in reference to what's being burned in a mental effort (said by a test prep speaker at the health sciences club)
• More butlers
• A magic user who has to permanently fuse one of his joints with every spell

Sharing is Caring

Some of you may have noticed that, on a quite a few of my fiction and fan fiction ideas, I've put up a notice that someone else is free to try it out. My father is staunch in his belief that such a thing will inevitably lead to someone taking my idea and making millions off it. (If they can, power to them. It's better than I would do, anyway.)

Yet I've also heard that posting ideas publicly helps to enforce that they belong to me. With all of the other posts I put out here, it would be hard to argue that a posted story idea was actually posted after someone else started writing that story—even if I can change one timestamp, it's obvious whenabouts I posted that idea.

At the same time, I'm posting all of my Fragments, which are so little and vague anyone could take one and slip it in without drawing suspicion. And that's okay. I've already taken an idea from a friend and then given it back to her. I don't mind. Just because these thoughts entered my brain doesn't mean I have irrefutable claims to them, or responsibilities to write them. It just means I had an idea that I can treat however I please.

As I just mentioned, I take ideas from others. Of course I do! There aren't really any new ideas; it's just the combinations. And if I use ideas from others, why shouldn't others get to use ideas from me? Half of them they'd find elsewhere, anyway; I just thought it would be nice to get them all in one place.

Basically, writing is more of a social occupation that it seems like it should be. I could probably lock myself in my room and just ideas from other books—and indeed I will do this—but that's not enough. I have to get a few ideas from living my life, and, still, that's not quite interesting enough to get me all the material I need for an original piece, anyway (considering I do, in fact, prefer to lock myself in my room all of the time). So I get a few ideas from others' lives and the stories they've read. We bounce all of our ideas off each other, and both of us can come out of it with stories that never would have occurred to us otherwise. Maybe there is some competition when it comes to publishing and such, but writing to me just seems like a team sport.

What do you think? Enjoy sharing your ideas? Enjoy seeing others'?

Wanderers (NFI#18) Revisited

You may recall that for the story Wanderers, I found my setting and haphazardly put together a few characters and a plot that weren't particularly inspired. Now I have a few alternatives to play with in this world. None are really complete, but at least they're there.

Alternative 1: The Original

Overall, everything is peaceful and there is little crime. Joey has finally separated from his parents and his main group of friends to marry Annette, who is now expecting. Then Peter swipes Annette's light jacket (containing some precious family heirloom) and runs. None of their group can quite catch up, and it's exceptionally difficult to track someone who doesn't want to be found.

Alternative 2: The Speed Demon

While anything other than walking is very much frowned upon, sometimes running just isn't fast enough to do the job. Meet Jonas Patriot, the emergency medicine expert whose motorbike puts him in more danger than most of his clients. Being of this world, his location at any one time is as unsure as a dog sniffing chocolate, but he spreads his telegraph address everywhere he walks, and there are plenty of stations along the bridges to holler a new job at him. If the injured or ill person is near, he might walk, but more often than not he has to break out the bike. Not that he minds terribly.

Alternative 3: The Tinkerer

It's a bit difficult to keep walking the bridges when one is carrying all manners of prototypes and tools. Nevertheless, Sterling does his best to keep his mountain of a backpack balanced as he waves his inventions at anyone who might use them. It's difficult for technology to catch on, however, and his uselessness in other ventures isn't good. After crossing the same bridges without being of service too anyone a few too many times, the grocers start to freeze him out, and the success of his next creation may be a matter of life and death.

Fragments II

A sequel to Fragments, because the platelets of the idea universe will never stop coming.

On another note, I really need to work on my metaphors.

• Someone whose dream is to be a graphic T-shirt designer
• A character named Jovial Munk (at my father's request)
• Twin female telepaths, one who controls sugar and the other salt
• Terrorist retirement (after my mother mishearing "terrace")
• A manga about a foosball player
• An excuse to use "mediastinum" (dedicated to Dr. Li)
• Someone with the phone number 324-5873 (spells "failure")
• Some modern fantasy version of the Song of Everlasting Sorrow
• A man walks out to get his mail, sees a wasp, slaps it to the ground with the letters he just retrieved, stomps on it, and yells "SKILLS" before returning to the house (my father is cool sometimes)
• A super-steampunk megalethoscope
• Intelligent, demonic honeybees
• A maestro who can command heartbeats by conducting

Fragments

Novel ideas are just a combination of weird quirks that interest me enough to require toying with them. Sometimes, though, I only end up with one little fragment of an idea with no idea as to what to put with it. Here I will compile some of these fragments, and maybe I (or you!) can figure out what should go together, or what else should be brought in.

• An army mime (after seeing the words juxtaposed in a Scrabble solver)
• Some sort of traditional epic fantasy
• A family that possesses full-grown beards from birth that protect their owners (thanks to Caleb being weird after reading the surname "Beardsley")
• A world with no bodies, only voices
• A musical based on Journey songs
• An overly-independent disabled person learning to rely on others sometimes
• A modern day teen sucked into a fantasy world who insists on calling sprites "pixels"
• A family where all of the children are named after different types of tea
• A dark novel titled Thus Quoth the Raven
• Something with two cats sitting atop a car in a neighbourhood and chatting whilst sipping tea (because my eyes took too long to figure out that was just a ladder wrapped in plastic blowing in the wind...)
• Main characters called Lizzie and Ferd who are always at each other's throats
• A fight scene on the outside of this building
  

New Fiction Idea #13

Somehow came to me while doing the environmental unit in chemistry (which makes me happy for the sole reason I haven't already had those lessons).

Title: Mount (could be changed)

Genre: Steampunk

Protagonist: Theodore Florence, a twenty-something young man with dark hair, olive skin, and hazel eyes. He's tall but skinny and dresses very well. His family is filthy-rich, and he's grown up in a sheltered place that let him stay cheerfully naive. He has an extremely positive view of human progress. He is stubborn and may be prone to challenging others to a duel-to-the-death if he doesn't get what he wants.

Other Main Characters: Daphne, Theodore's 19-year-old sister. Her skin and hair are lighter than her brother's, but they certainly have a family resemblance. She keeps her very long hair in a fancy updo and has a weakness for elaborate dresses and hats. She's very sympathetic towards others. She's just as naive as her brother but handles affronts to her fantasy world a bit better.
Dobson and Crick, two high-class engineers in the Florences' service. They're both well-built geniuses (though Dobson is a bit on the short side) that have fallen on hard times. They'll happily work on foolish projects just for the money.

Antagonist: At this point, nature and the laws of physics. There could be other opposition as the story progresses.

Setting: Typical steampunk universe. The actual story takes place in a Himalaya-type area, specifically their world's largest mountain. It has enough areas of vegetation to support some wildlife and peoples but is mostly rock face. The incline generally increases as the mountain goes up, and there are no roads beyond a few simple foot trails.

Plot: Theodore wants to build a railroad straight up the side of the mountain, more or less just because he can. Given the track and train won't be serving any real jobs, Dobson and Crick  manage to work some steampunk engineering magic (depending of the advice of my engineer friends, it could involve actual magic if necessary) and start building the rails. The trip does not go smoothly, however, and Theodore's insistence on watching the entire process—and Daphne's tendency to follow him everywhere—starts to take a toll as the comforts available drop off. Still the Florences and their workers continue, challenging themselves to get past natural obstacles and the troublesome natives until they reach the summit.

Point of View: First person (Theodore).

Seems like pretty standard steampunk stuff. If the physics is a bit too much, I could make them try to get to the top to build a zeppelin airport, but that seems a little less fun.

These Dreams

I had a bizarre dream this morning, but I can't remember it for anything now. It would have been nice to have the time to write it down.

I've been considering starting a dream journal for a while. My dreams rarely fail to amuse me, but just like my story ideas—or, more extremely than my story ideas—they fade in and out of my mind. I've tried just rehearsing events that happened, but if I don't write them down—sometimes telling others doesn't even do it—it'll be gone by the end of Genetics class.

Dreams are good for a lot more than vague amusement, too. The idea for Chemists came from one of my dreams. The idea for Entrapped came from the dream of a friend of a friend. Even if loads of pons firing is total rubbish, there are some interesting little gems to be retrieved in all of it.

Would you be interested in reading some of my dreams on here? I still have a few fairly recent ones—and the legendary twin squirrels dream—I could put, though I can't guarantee I'll remember anything that comes up later, or have any sort of predictability as to whether I dream something interesting or not. Nor can I say any of it will be worth reading, but it could give one of us some inspiration, I think.

Any recommendations for dream journals? I still have a mostly-empty moleskine (apparently they're a big deal) that I used a bit in NaNoWriMo, and I had been considering using it. I'm probably not going to be able to type everything up here in time, so I'll have to write it down somehow.

Also, I name a lot of my blog posts after songs...