My brain is violently ping-pong-ing between half a dozen different original fiction ideas right now and getting excited about all of them at once, so I guess here's a rundown of the things that are occupying my brain right now:
The Woodsman and the Wolf
The newest idea on the list, this one is going to be a comic/graphic novel. It's a queerplatonic fable-y, fairytale-y short story about a woodsman who lives in a village under the threat of The Wolf (a monstrous creature that's been killing livestock and villagers who stray too far from the village's lights) and the injured traveller that he rescues in the forest one day. Except said traveller is secretly a werewolf and maybe there's also more to The Wolf than first appears... It's a story about who and what we call a monster and the harm that othering can cause, and it kind of sprung fully formed into my head after I watched the Nimona movie after re-reading Witches Abroad and while also thinking about all the things that made me mad about how She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Platformed treated Lupin in the HP books. It's also about anger, and werewolves as a metaphor for the parts of ourselves we're scared to acknowledge, and the healing that comes from choosing to build things rather than destroy. I thought about making it gay, but then I realised that I had an opportunity to have the happy ending be queerplatonic and now I'm really excited about writing these sad broken disasters (because the Woodsman has his own share of baggage) slowly finding understanding and a home together. Do I have any idea how to make a graphic novel? No, but I'm not going to let that stop me because I've become very fond of this story very quickly.
Untitled Science Fantasy Thing
I've been referring to the setting for this one as 'Willa's World' after one of the protagonists, and I think it's a novel? This one came about when I smashed together my two favourite general characters, Ironwood and Armstrong, and ended up with an extremely tired, angry woman who's desperately trying to protect her country from an ever-escalating invasion of monsters from the frozen north while slowly losing what remains of her shit and being pushed out of her own story by The Idealistic Teen Protagonist(TM) who has just crashed into the middle of all this and is equally determined to save the world her own way. The general is Willa Stonehold, the Teen Protagonist is Maisie Kennard, and I love them both, the whole story is built around their clash of narratives and genres and personalities and the fact that neither of them can save the world alone. Willa's side of the story is about being middle-aged and butch and aroace and disabled and angry and lonely and reckoning with the fact that she's been tearing herself apart to protect a world that at best wishes she'd stay quiet and invisible, but fuck them she's going to go down in a blaze of glory and destroy the monsters along with herself and Then They'll All See. And Maisie is also aroace and figuring out where she fits in the world but doing it with a determined bloody-minded hopefulness that, along with her Weird Magic Protagonist Powers, might just warp the story around her enough that she can drag the people she cares about into a happy ending as well. And that's not even the half of it, it's a whole thing, I've only got about 2/3rds of a plot figured out but a whole heck of a lot of Thematic Stuff that I'm rotating violently in my brain and cackling delightedly about.
This one has been bouncing around my brain for years, and really it's a TV series concept, but realistically I think the right format for it is going to be a series of short comics. It's otherwise known as 'that Scottish urban fantasy thing', and the basic idea is that Our Protagonists work for an organisation that deals with the weird stuff that arises when the human and magical worlds interact. These are the guys that go around the universities and do presentations telling students not to drink any beer if they end up at a fairy party, or settle disputes over beach usage between selkies and tourists, or deal with brownie infestations on the high street. There's a glamour situation at play kind of equivalent to the 'Somebody Else's Problem field' from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where regular people mostly don't notice or slowly forget the magical elements of things they see, but the more exposed you are to magic the more of it you start seeing around you. Most of the employees at the organisation are people who got involved in some sort of magic nonsense and suddenly were seeing it everywhere and demanding explanations. The main characters are Kevin, a thoroughly regular bloke who is also aroace and has been platonically married to his best mate Dave ever since that was legal and got them tax benefits, and Jay, who is three hundred years old and laughs at your concepts of gender and is also deeply magically weird thanks to being left on a fairy hill as a child and adopted by the fae, who rubbed off on them. Together, they investigate weird shit and get up to wacky adventures, mostly in places in Scotland that I personally know because why the hell not. (An iconic minor character that my sister and I co-invented years ago is Nippy the Chip Kelpie, a particularly weird kelpie that lives in the River Girvan and likes nothing better than hanging out with the seagulls at the beach and sticking his giant soggy horse head through car windows in order to steal chips from people parked by the promenade to enjoy the view.) The whole 'verse is a bit more on the comedy side of things, it's fun.
Werewolf Detectives Thing
This is another pretty recent idea, because I've had werewolves on the brain. Well, some of it is older, but the current iteration that's in the early stages of development is from the last few months. The basic idea is that it's the late 1820s in Edinburgh, and assorted magical folks are living on the edges of human society, including both werewolves and wulvers. A former trainee soldier who was kicked out of the army after he was bitten by a werewolf (and doesn't have a definite name yet, but I think his surname might be Grey) has been existing in this society as a werewolf for a decade or two when he comes across another man, a teacher, who has only been recently turned. He takes it upon himself to mentor the new werewolf, to help him figure out his new life, but said teacher is a little bit distracted trying to investigate some disappearances and deaths within the magical community. (Even when he was human, he was known to magical folks because because he was one of the few willing to teach magical children to read and write.) Grey gets dragged into investigating along with him, and they eventually end up setting up a detective agency together. (In theory it's a book series and they go on to have continuing adventures, but who the fuck knows if I'll ever get that far.) It's specifically set in the 1820s because that's when Edinburgh was in the middle of a whole thing involving graverobbing to provide corpses for the medical school, which eventually led to the Burke and Hare murders, and that seemed like an interesting time to plonk some magical shenanigans and amateur detective nonsense. Oh, and the teacher? He's trans, and faked his own death before he moved to the big city under his new name. Which I haven't decided on yet, names are hard, but I love him, he's great. In this one, the werewolf stuff is a big old queer metaphor, and I'm going to have some fun with the relationship between werewolves and wulvers on that front, too.
Untitled DnD Nonsense feat. Sam and Arthur
This is what happens when you realise that the backstories of a couple of DnD characters rhyme rather nicely, and I don't know if it's a novel or a comic or really what the main bulk of the plot is, but I am rotating it in my brain. Dr Sam Harnendil is accidentally a cleric, but really he'd rather just be a doctor. He was conscripted as a battlefield surgeon, and he gained his cleric abilities when he yelled at the holy symbol of a dying paladin, telling her god that she ought to Do Her Fucking Job, and said god gave him magic in answer. He struggled to go back to a normal life after the war ended, so in the present he's a travelling doctor, helping where he can and keeping his magic upgrade on the down-low. And then there's Arthur Fenn, a sellsword that he meets on the road, who clearly has a lot of history that he is Not going to talk about. It eventually turns out that Arthur was General Ridill, the general in command of the army that conscripted Sam all those years ago, and he lost everything when his kingdom fell in the final battle of the war. Not just that, but he was mutinied against by his own troops for wanting to unleash a monstrous shadow entity on the enemy as a desperate last resort, and he's now just a little bit possessed by said shadow entity that's been giving him powers and feeding him promises of vengeance. Ideally I'd love to bounce the two of them off of each other in a DnD campaign, but since I can't do that I've been slowly coming up with a story around the two of them that's about a doctor and a general who were fucked up by the same war and the parts they played in it, and how they figure out their own paths in the face of the powerful entities that want to control them. Other potential players in the story are Arthur's ex-something (it's complicated), a man called Cor (aka Cornelius Fenn, and yes, Arthur is using his surname as a alias) who was a spy for the same kingdom, and a teenage wannabe monster slayer called Merewyn who decides she's going to tag along with these losers after they pass through her village and study them for her own entertainment and education.
Untitled (And Slightly Neglected) Sci-Fi Thing
This one is a novel that's been rattling around by brain for about five years now, and is pretty much the first original project I was serious about as an adult, although I've slightly neglected it of late. It's a sci-fi story about first contact, in which an exploration pilot called Alastair Hayashi who lives in the space-future ends up becoming the first human to meet aliens when they capture his ship in the middle of a mysterious uncharted area of Weird Space Nonsense nicknamed the Gnarly Cloud. (After how it was described by the space truckers who got the first good in-person look at it.) Alastair ends up stuck on an alien world surrounded by belligerent, xenophobic bird people, in the role of the alien in Area 51, and having to explain the concept of humans to a race that was just as unaware of their neighbours as we were of them. The fact that their Prototypical Human is a gay, autistic Japanese-Scottish amputee rather than a Straight Cis White Guy(TM) is a source of alternating amusement and exasperation to him, he is having A Time. Meanwhile, back on the space station where he lives on the edge of the Cloud, he's been declared missing-presumed-dead, which his best friend and fellow pilot who saw the abduction is Strenuously objecting to because she wants to go in and rescue him, and his space trucker husband is starting to uncover evidence that maybe the existence of aliens on the other side of the Cloud wasn't as much a surprise to certain people as it ought to have been... Alastair eventually makes it back to the station with the help of one of the alien scientists, and finds himself stuck in the middle of a first contact situation that is rapidly sliding in the direction of a war that he is determined to prevent. I still love this story and the characters, but it's not thematically grabbing me the way it used to so I think I need to play around with it some more. (And maybe rewatch Voltron, because frustrations about Shiro's storyline was what spawned Alastair in the first place.) It's got 2/3rds of a plot but I need to re-find the themes that got me excited about it in the first place, and maybe throw in some more that are more what I'm enjoying in stories now, five-ish years after I came up with this one.
Last but the opposite of least, this one is the webcomic I'm developing with @yourfriendlyneighborhoodenby! It's got a whole blog with character stuff and art over at @redshiftblueshiftcomic, but here's the short-ish version:
Dan Gibson (they/them) is the leader of a team in the space-future that investigates crimes against robots and works to protect robot rights, and they're the sort of exhausted team dad character that inevitably becomes my favourite in any media about a team. They're Hotch from Criminal Minds meets the person Harrison Wells originally seemed to be in s1 of The Flash, meets early volumes Ironwood, and they're transmasc nonbinary and aroace Because Why Not. Also on their team are Georgie (she/her), boisterous gym butch and the team's legal expert, Bob (he/him), an ancient and grumpy military tank bot who renounced his weapons and was part of the first generation of robots to be considered sapient, Peregrine (he/they), Dan's protégé and a bitchy android with custom giant claw feet, Cobi (they/them), an excitable spaceship AI who gets the team where they want to go, and Max (ey/em), an opinionated and principled trainee agent who's a human who was raised by robots. Together, they have a bunch of adventures involving, among other things, an ancient sentient generation ship that they have to rescue from unscrupulous salvagers, bots going missing on a robot retirement moon, a would-be cult leader enslaving robots with mysterious mind-control tech he claims to have brought back from the future, and a mysterious mask-wearing individual that seems to be following the team around and pursuing some sort of unknown agenda of their own.
Other characters include Hector (he/him), a fellow agent in the anti-terrorism branch of the team's organisation who is starting to have doubts about how the organisation is run, Kamari (she/her), an enigmatic and dapper butch android working for persons and causes unknown, and Patch (they/them), a spaceship repair bot who has upgraded their own programming so many times that their list of skills is as long as one of their extendable arms (and even includes brain surgery, which no one has let them try yet, much to their disappointment). And, of course, aforementioned mysterious masked individual, the truth of whose identity drags the team and the rest of the cast into something much bigger and more ominous than they ever suspected could be going on.
It's a story about robots and queer people and queer robots (most of whom are also autistic), and so much of the Big Plot Stuff is a metaphor for the times we live in and the backslide in attitudes towards trans folks in particular, but also it's about having adventures in space and robots and spaceships and the power of solidarity, and we're both so excited about the whole thing. It really is one of those stories where we're putting everything that we love into it, and it's going to be big and epic and it's terribly daunting to thinking about the work that's going to go into a ten chapter webcomic, but we love this story and these characters and it's going to be a thing that we can actually share eventually. You should absolutely check out the blog we're been throwing the character development art onto if any of this sounds like a good time to you too.
(No, this post wasn't originally intended to be a 'check out our webcomic-in-development post, but it sort of is now, I guess.)
So yeah, stories! I have so many, they're all I want to talk about, please talk to me about some of these ideas if any of them have grabbed you, you'll make my week.
