Batblog

An Excess of Shorts

Okay, I've got myself some coconut juice (which I'm drinking straight out of the coconut, because why not) and I figure now is as good a time as any to talk about some short story ideas I've been kicking around. I haven't developed any of these much beyond the basic concepts, and it's probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future because I want to spend the next few weeks focusing on The Krimson Traitor, but I felt like throwing them out there anyway for anyone who might be interested.

-This first one is another story set in the Mythryn universe, which, in the same vein as Starwake, would likely be a smaller, low-key story detailing how one of the major characters set to show up in Mythryn (in this case, an unflappable and heavily-accented red fox named Warth) ended up in Brass Valley in the first place. I'm not entirely sure what the point of the story would be, but I know I'd like to go somewhere with it since I really haven't spend much time with the non-birds of the setting or even talked at all about the canine-dominated city of Cliffden.

-You know, has there ever been a story about dolphins where the dolphins were the antagonists (and not sympathetic antagonists, either, like in the movie Orca; I mean where the dolphins are just being jerks for the sake of being jerks, as they're very much prone to in real life)? Well, what better place to delve into such a stereotype-defying concept than the Mythryn world? This story would follow the crew of a small merchant ship (probably starring a young otter as the protagonist) as they're subject to the increasingly-violent attention of a gang of punk dolphins and have to find a way to deal with the situation before anyone gets hurt. This story would obviously be a bit more substantive and drama-filled, and I have a better idea of where I want to take it, so this is probably the story that's going to get written first.

-This story concept is a little different, and to help you understand where it comes from I'm going to have to tell you a little bit about my family history. First, my last name - Miljkovich - is Serbian, and comes from my mother. When I was growing up, she used to tell me a lot of stories about her father, Stanislav "Stasha" Miljkovich. One such story was about how my grandfather was a soldier for the Serbian military in WWII, but wound up being captured and spending the rest of the war in a POW camp. With him being an actor by avocation, him and the other POWs would put together plays for their captors. I don't know enough of the details to make a true biographical piece (nor could I ever ask for them, as my grandfather died about five years before I was born and my mother died when I was fourteen), but I still think there's a really strong concept there that I would like to expand upon. Some sort of war drama, perhaps, where an actor-turned-soldier winds up being captured by the enemy and has to use his acting skills to ingratiate himself to his captors and keep himself alive. It could be really interesting, especially once the reader learns that it has a loose basis in real events.

Again, I want to focus on The Krimson Traitor for a bit, so these concepts are likely to stay mere concepts for a while yet. But still, this should be enough to give a taste of what I've got in store for the future.