the wheels they be a'turning

Lots and lots of brainstorming going on lately, working out a large number of different creative projects.

1. For the roleplaying game I just joined, I have to make two characters. One a vampire, and one a vampire hunter. (The idea is to play both sides of the coin.) The setting of this game is fairly unique, so I can't just look at my stock of possible characters I already have and pick one of those. I have to make them from scratch.

I can't make characters from scratch to save my life. :p Any time I have to do that, it takes me a good couple of weeks before I have enough ideas to start writing anything down. For the past two years, I think I've made .. like ... 3 characters entirely from a blank page. Every other character is either based on (heavily plagiarizing) someone I've made before, or it's something slapped together by taking bits and pieces of other backstories and sticking them all in one character to see what happens.

So my vampire character is kind of sitting there on backburner because I have some beginning stirrings of ideas brewing, but not much to write yet. My human, on the other hand ... I started with a viable seed that just grew and blossomed like no tomorrow. ;) I borrowed (shamelessly lifted) an idea from someone else's NPC in another game (NPC's parents were killed by vamps when she was a child). Then I threw in some elements of backstory from one of my own characters (Rumen's last rampage after he went mad from losing his human servant). And voila ... now I have this guy who hates vampires because they killed his entire family when he was 6, and also royally screwed up his life, and now that he's grown up he wants nothing better than to kill them all.

It also meant I got to work in the opposite angle to part of Rumen's backstory, which makes it just that much more meaningful to me personally, even if Rumen's side of it isn't terribly relevant to the game this is for and probably won't ever come up. Basically, since I know exactly why my character's family line was killed, it makes it a lot easier to write what it looked like from his point of view.

I wrote up the first half of the human's story, and it's about 6 large paragraphs already. By the time I'm done it'll probably be around 10-12. Then I submit to the GM, who will tell me what I can do with the stats. I'm allowed to play a Hunter: the Reckoning hunter if I want, but haven't decided whether I will do that or not.

Gotta get back to the vampire at some point soon...

2. Labor Day novel. I scrapped the entire outline that I had going before. The more I got into it, the less I liked it. It was starting to feel like I was trying to force things to go the wrong way, and that the theme wanted to apply itself in a completely different way than what I was thinking. So now I'll be doing something similar to what I had in mind originally, but completely different at the same time. A lot of the scenes I was going to include will still be in there - but the details will be drastically altered. It should all fit a lot better.

In a nutshell ... the original spark for this was the song by Joan Osbourne - "What if God was One of Us?" So my question became, "What if God was a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home?" And the working title of this novel will be: "Stranger on a Bus." Makes sense, huh. ;) (I have a previous blog entry where I ranted at length about the details, if anyone wants to dig for it.)

Well, in the new improved version, the main point-of-view character is going to be the bus driver. Not God. God is going to be this perfectly normal looking guy who's taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Except that he keeps doing wild and wacky miraculous things along the way. The bus driver is sort of this wisecracking sarcastic guy who's going to watch all this and think "who the hell is this? Is he some kind of superhero?"

(The bus driver, incidentally, is not a from-scratch character. There are elements of three other (roleplay) characters going into him. :p)

Also, the entirety of the novel is going to take place from the bus trip. No flashbacks to incidents past in other places or anything. So every single scene is going to be something that could conceivably have occurred while on a roadtrip. This might sound like it's a limit, but it's actually the exact opposite. It provides me with some structure to work with so that I can get very creative within the bounds of the structure. That's how I work best. I can't do anything from scratch, or when the sky's the limit, because then I just get frozen with indecision and never start. But put down some boundaries and boom. ;)

This also takes me back to making it a comedic novel. The ideas I had before were threatening to make it a lot more serious than I can possibly do if I'm going to write this in three days.

3. Taint. As I said in my last blog entry, I'm thinking to write this in roleplay format. One scene at a time polished to perfection, one per week (or so). So... I need to start. But where? I need a good opener, and I haven't figured out what would work yet. There are a lot of scenes going into this, all of them personally important to one or both of the MCs, but they're really kind of scattered. There's nothing really tying it all together. The time range is fairly significant as well - about 150 years between the earliest and the latest event.

This is making me want to come up with a single main event that sparks them to have lots of flashbacks. I do have a single main event at the near end of the timeline, and it's even still vague and flexible enough that I could do all kinds of things with it, add personally meaningful elements to make them think about their pasts. But ... the structure feels kind of wrong. Something I can't quite pinpoint that I don't like about it. So I probably won't do that. But I don't know yet what I'll be doing instead.

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Anyhow, so that's what's on the plate at the moment. Still got a lot of thinking to do, but gotta braindump some of it soon. Should be fun however things turn out. ;)