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story pitch: “to reach the farthest star”

May 14, 2008 – 1:09 pm

So, I haven’t posted here in a long while, and what small bits of fiction I have written of late have appeared at Ficlets. But, I’m hoping to get more active here in the coming months.

To kick that off a bit, I’ve got an idea for an episodic serial story that I’d like to eventually podcast—here’s a quick pitch:

Working title: “To Reach the Farthest Star”

Jack Arden is an internet billionaire who’s been in the right places at the right times as a software architect and entrepreneur. He’s had a hand in some of the most brilliant rising stars and flamboyant failures of the last 20 years of the web.

But, today, Jack turns 35 and plans to retire from that life to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Unlike most children who’ve had that same dream, Jack has spent the last decade training and conditioning himself while quietly funding and directing research to make his fantasy of private spaceflight a reality.

And finally, as Jack prepares to step away from some of the most lucrative terrestrial opportunities of his charmed life, a way to the stars opens before him.

As these things usually go, however, neither his training nor his lifelong obsession with science fiction have left him fully prepared for this journey and its strange destination.

…and that’s it so far. The title’s up in the air, and the premise is a bit melodramatic - but I’m hoping to write something with a bit of a good old junky scifi pulp feel. I’ve got lots of ideas, and I’m idly working on a bible for a dozen or so stories. Let me know what you think of the pitch, oh hypothetical readers. :)

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Alpha vs Delta - Part III

January 13, 2008 – 4:56 pm

It’s getting close to a year of neglect, but here’s a quick Part III to Alpha vs Delta, my exercise in 7th Son / Infection fanfic.

For all parts of this story, check the Alpha vs Delta category.

I’m thinking that this is now part 3 of 6, and I hope that I can actually get my brain back into writing and finishing this. The previous two parts - and the whole thing - will need some revisions when I’m done. The 7th Son trilogy so far is complete, and there have been some revelations which make it plain to me that I’ve missed a few things. My brief characterization of Special(k) is totally bogus, for instance.

But, nonetheless, I forge ahead with Alpha vs Delta - Part III:

On the first day of invasion, trillions of Spores had rained down from the upper edges of the sky. Of those trillions, barely a hundred had made successful contact with poor Marten’s shambling form, as he had made way his home on yet another winter afternoon of early darkness. And of the hundred or so that had landed on Marten, most had succumbed to exposure or had simply fallen away as he’d walked.

Read More »

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Find me on Ficlets

March 15, 2007 – 4:10 pm

Almost as if the lazyweb has read my mind and found my recently formulated yet unspoken intention to regularly spew tiny bits of fiction to get my gears turning, I discover Ficlets via BoingBoing.

Hopefully, I’ll begin regularly producing my own ficlets over here on my Ficlets author page. If I get a habit going, I might pipe and republish some of the stuff from there to here.

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Hellcat

March 14, 2007 – 12:40 am

A writing prompt borrowed from http://100wordstories.com/2007/03/13/:

…around the bushes and up a tree…

“Billy,” said Jake, rubbing his hand, “that damn cat bit me!”

“Jake,” said Billy, “what the hell? I told you I’d be right back!”

“It looked like I could grab it by the tail. But, it bit me and ran around the bushes and up a tree out back.”

“Jake, I’m telling you that weren’t no cat.”

“What the hell was it then, huh?”

“I don’t know, but cats ain’t got wings. Or glowing red eyes!”

“It sure howled like it was a cat.”

“Well, hell, I’d howl too if I had a tail and you grabbed it like that!”

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Subversive Brew

March 13, 2007 – 2:38 am

A writing prompt borrowed from http://100wordstories.com/2007/03/12/:

You go into your kitchen in the morning and there’s a note next to your coffee maker. What does it say?

“Warning: Consumption of beverages produced by this machine may counteract community-mandated tranquility agents introduced by municipal drinking water treatment.”

Mark found the transparent and still-tacky sticker upside-down on the counter next to the coffee maker. Looking up, he could see a clean spot on the machine’s stainless-steel casing, where the past few years’ worth of accumulated crud abruptly stopped. He scratched his head: He’d never seen warnings on the machine before now.

He finished the last sip of the best cup he’d ever brewed — and startled himself with a spontaneous yawp.

Just then, jack-booted thugs burst through his door.

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Goddess of Mikey

March 10, 2007 – 3:25 am

So, I figured that I could help break my general writing stoppage by switching gears from Alpha vs Delta for a brief bit. I promise get back to AvD very shortly. In the meantime, here’s a story I’ve hastily entitled “Goddess of Mikey,” from an idea that’s been bobbing through my head the past few mornings:

“Time to wake up, Mikey,” said his mother, softly nudging open his bedroom door.

Mikey had slapped the snooze button on his alarm clock fifteen minutes earlier, at six o’clock. As his mother lacked a similar feature, he groaned and rolled over with his pillow covering his head. Undaunted, she continued into his room to his bedside, to gently shake him awake.

“C’mon sweetie, you’ll be late for school.”

“School sucks. Wanna sleep.”

“You should’ve gone to bed earlier, kiddo. Now get up. If I don’t hear you in the shower in the next ten minutes, I’ll be back with a bucket of ice water.” She turned and left the room, her footsteps traveling down the hall and downstairs.

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Status on Alpha vs Delta - Part III

March 6, 2007 – 3:12 am

After a somewhat unintentional hiatus, I got back to some writing tonight - specifically for the Alpha vs Delta fanfic I started here. I’m about 1500 words into Part III, which I think makes it a little under half-way done. Finally switching to the Triangles’ point of view here and mixing things up a bit with a new character entering the mess. Hopefully I’ll have the next installment posted here within the next day or so, and then try to commit to getting the rest of the installments out within a week of each other.

Update (03/08/2007): Got a few more hundred words written - pretty pitiful. Still trying to work out how to get writing done after a brain draining day at work.

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opposite of flow

February 20, 2007 – 12:45 am

So, after a busy week and long weekend, I’ve stalled on writing. I think tonight’s a wash, too. Watching Heroes after a day of lazing around, playing WoW. Hopefully I’ll get back into it this week. I think that’s one of the big challenges: Balancing work, play, laziness, procrastination, and inspiration. While I’m in the process of writing, it feels great and I wonder why I ever doubted I could do it. Then, I stop. The longer I stay stopped, the more it seems like someone else’s activity - not mine. Oh well, let’s see what happens once I’m back into the swing of this week.

I know a lot of this just comes down to building new habits, slogging through the work, choosing to work. The really good inspiration and creative moments come on their own, captured with various tools at the ready. But, the rest of it is just putting butt-in-chair, fingers to keys, pen to paper. The rest is work and habits that I don’t have down yet.

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Doctor Who and the Tale of Four Parts

February 14, 2007 – 8:06 pm

Another thought for the episodic fiction ponderings pile:

Old-school Doctor Who from the BBC seemed to have a good formula. Unlike the more recent regeneration, the original series told stories stretched over a handful of hour-long episodes, usually four to six in number. And, although plot details from previous tales might come up again, each new story tended to start from an abruptly new premise. Accordingly, for a podcast, a single tale might not fit into a single half-hour or hour long narration - but a convention of splitting stories up into four or five parts might work.

This also has some implications for the overall framework, if we’re really following the Doctor Who conventions: The series, as a whole, is really more about the central character and hangers-on than a coherent arc of plot. I wonder if there’s some variant of this that can work for me?

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Serialized Novels versus Episodic Fiction

February 14, 2007 – 7:51 pm

So, I’ve got story ideas percolating in my head, and I’ve posted some of them. I’m currently working on one of them out in the open as a rough draft serial, and I’m also taking occasional pokes at this other one.

Looking my batch of podcast subscriptions, I could see myself trying to submit some of these stories, once polished and finished, to something like Escape Pod. They’re one-off short stories, many circling around a shared theme. I’ve also considered together a limited run podcast collection of these stories, based on that theme.

But, beyond that, I’ve been trying to come up with something that’s not so much a short story or a novel, yet generates entertaining tales for an ongoing period. If I were to do a fictional podcast, I think I’d like to do it in the spirit of a TV series. That is, a season of episodes, each self-contained but contributing to a continuing arc — like a string of pearls. To do that, I need to come up with a framework that can help anchor and support interesting short stories. It should offer some interesting features for exploration, some ongoing conflicts to revisit often, and some paths for longer-arc development.

It seems to me that there’s a subtle difference between a season of a TV series and a novel proper. They both can carry a big story over a broad stretch of time, but an episodic series format appears to offer some flexibility in terms of flow that a novel can’t:

  • An episodic series handles arbitrary cancellation more gracefully than would a novel that just stopped in the middle.
  • Vice versa, an episodic series handles carrying on for an arbitrary number of seasons better than a novel that just never finishes.
  • Last but not least, an episodic series offers more opportunity to make it up as you go along. For better or worse, that contributes to being able to actually release material over time without having to create it all up front.

All of this sounds attractive to me in considering the production of a podcast that I might start up, run for awhile, and then one day abandon or place on hiatus. I know this sounds like a pessimistic premise, but it’s a practical one. I’ve moved and changed jobs enough times to know that I need to keep my options open. And, given that, it sounds like an episodic series offers the least disappointment down the road for either audience or storyteller. It sucks when your favorite show gets canceled, and maybe the longer-arc concerns are left as loose ends — but, if it was done right, at least you had the individual stories along the way.

Hmm, things to think about. I have an idea I’m working on - so maybe in the next post or so, I’ll make another pitch to flesh out the idea.

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