Monday 2 May 2005

Pic of the day: "You're thinking that this is all silly, aren't you?" Well, you're right. And this screenshot is from the anime Mahoraba - Heartful Days.

Second-hand daydreams

My thumb is not getting worse, which is a good thing. My throat is getting worse, which is understandable since I have used my speech recognition software for some of my writing.

I have two novel writing projects going on at the same time. Ironically, both of them are inspired by TV series. That is not to say that they are fan fiction or anything remotely similar to that. Rather, imagine condensing each TV series down to one or two sentences, or at most a very short paragraph, and then writing a new story based on that.

***

One story, working title simply "Pietro" after the main character, is inspired by Smallville (of which I had not seen season 3 at the time, but it doesn't really change anything). However, you won't find Clark or Lex or Lana or people who look and act like them. The connection is about as small as this:
"Teen boy with mysterious origin starts to develop superhuman abilities in a small community. How will his secret affect his chance of finding friendship and love?"
The actual characters are different: Pietro is at least half human (his mother is known, not his father). His abilities are psionic, not physical: Clairvoyance, teleportation, psykokinesis etc. Also there are three distinct female main characters (just not as main as the male, whose thoughts we get to know). His cousin is physically attractive but unavailable because they're related. Then there's the pretty girl who is kinda available but also happens to be the village tricycle, causing a lot of competition and jealousy. Then there's the shy bookish girl who is more a friend than a crush, but who also happens to be a catalyst of his powers. As you can see, none of these really map onto the Smallville girls.

Oh, and this story has a theme song. And it's not Save Me (although I love that tune) but rather Chris de Burgh's Diamond in the Dark, a love song (as is fitting for this story) with a mix of the banal and the mysterious. I like to listen to it in between writing on the story (I can't work well with music actually running while writing, but it is fine while thinking about it).

The other story, working title "The Doubted Gift", is inspired by the anime "Ah! My Goddess!". But again, only the bare bones of the idea are conserved.
"Poor lonely teenage boy wishes for companionship and is assigned a female higher being who will be with him at all times, completely changing his life but also causing many weird situations."
However, in Gift the male main character fails to fully express his wish, and the superhuman woman is only partly incarnated. He can see her, but not touch her. Other people can not see her at all, while on the other hand she can touch non-sentient matter. Also she is not a goddess in any theological sense: She comes from a higher spacetime with two time dimensions, where our universe is only one of a myriad bubbles. She is unimaginably intelligent but inexperienced with our particular world and human culture.

***

I'll be completely honest and admit that I would probably not have come up with these ideas on my own. I have come up with some unique ideas in my lifetime, or at least ideas that I had not heard about before I made them myself. Some of them I haven't heard about later either, such as one of the three Thaumaturge stories, in which the main character gains superpowers in his late 70es, when he finally manages to piece together how the universe works. You don't see that kind of setting often, probably because there isn't a target group to market it to... But that's OK, since I just had fun experimenting with the idea.

Overall, I tend to approach my novels much like I do my Sims: I try to keep them alive and nudge them in the right direction, and watch their antics. I don't really know what they will be doing on any given day. This may not necessarily make for a good read, I don't know, but it makes it fun to write. And since my stories tend to have one more writer than readers, that's all I can ask for.