Batblog

I Can See The Future

Taking a short break from my work on The Krimson Traitor (I wrote like 600 words of dialog today; I'm rather proud of myself), I'd actually like to talk a little about the future. Specifically, the big original story projects I have lined up for when The Krimson Traitor is either done and over with or when I feel confident enough in my storytelling skills to start working on them. There are four of them all together, starting with:

-Mythryn: This is the "detective drama about a sarcastic talking crow" that I make mention of in my bio, and it's the project I plan to begin writing immediately after The Krimson Traitor. I actually have a proper back-of-the-book plot synopsis written in my story notes for this one, so I'll just paste that here to give you a taste:

It’s said that crows are among the most intelligent of all creatures, but Mythryn – “Ryn” for short – is smart even among crows, with a talent for finding the truth that no bird or beast can match. Making the most of her skills, she plies her trade as a freelance detective in the shining, steam-powered, crime-ridden metropolis of Brass Valley, where she’s gained both a great deal of fame among the populace, and infamy among the criminal and powerful. When an old colleague in the city Constabulary approaches her for help on a recent series of high-profile murders, she readily accepts, expecting another routine upstaging of conventional law enforcement, only to quickly find herself thrown into another mystery far more dangerous and ancient than even she could have ever imagined.

The closest series that I could liken the setting to is Kathryn Lasky's Guardians of Ga'Hoole, since, like in Ga'Hoole, the animals of this world all retain realistic sizes and anatomies. There are differences too, of course, such is the fact that the creatures in this setting are a bit more "civilized" than in Ga'hoole, organizing proper multi-species city-states and nations. The relative intelligences of all the different animal species are also intended to be more realistic. So instead of owls (which are actually rather dull in real life) being inexplicably smarter than every other animal, the real geniuses of the bird world would be things like crows, ravens, magpies, and parrots.

-Free Fox: This is my pet project of sorts; a sprawling science fiction series that I've been tossing around in my head for about as long as I've considered becoming a writer. The crux of the setting in its current incarnation is that it takes place in an alternate version of Earth where humans have existed for tens of thousands of years alongside a number of other sapient species; the free-spirited fruit bat-like Shiah, the bird-like warrior Therans, the peaceful arachnids, and a variety of other species in the backstory that will have either gone extinct or gone into hiding long before the main story starts. The first arc would be told as the written memoirs of the series' main protagonist (an eccentric human criminal-turned-military assassin named Zero), telling the tales of his exploits in saving the world from a series of tyrants and dangerous monsters.

To tell the truth, as much as I really really want to work on this story, I'm kind of afraid to. It's not the scope of the story that scares me, it's the protagonist; Zero. He's just so unabashedly extraordinary in every sense of the word, I'm afraid that if I don't handle his character very delicately, he could just end up becoming a big fat Gary Stu of the highest caliber instead of just being amusing and fun the way I intend. So, this project will remain on the back burner until I trust myself to not screw it up.

-Shade Prince (working title): This is a relatively new idea which I haven't expanded much on, but the basic idea is that a portal has opened to a world of terrifying monsters (called "Hell"), allowing the denizens of this Hell to mingle freely with humans. The protagonist would be a woman (who I haven't named yet) who has an unhealthy obsession with all things Hellish, and who eventually winds up falling in love with an enigmatic creature made of living shadow (the titular "Shade Prince"). Basically, it would be Twilight with a shadow creature, except unlike Twilight (which glorifies Bella's emotionally-stunted sate), this story would be all about exploring and addressing the deep psychological problems that are at the heart of the protagonist's self-destructive obsession with Hell.

-Untitled Inter-Dimensional Nonsense: This is an idea so recent that I haven't even thought of a title for it yet. The basic concept is that in this world there are certain individuals (called "Conduits") who are capable of summoning various types of inter-dimensional creature into our dimension. I haven't developed the plot much beyond the fact that the protagonist will be female and that she'll be of a particularly rare and potent type of Conduit. I also haven't decided if I want "dimensions" in this context to mean the real-world spacial dimensions (in which case I'd have to do a bit more research on the subject, which could take a while since I'm not mathematically inclined), or the more fantastical Lovecraftian horror sort of dimension. I'm also not sure what I'd do in terms of theme that hasn't already been done to death in things like X-Men and Frozen.