Thursday, May 28, 2015

Weird thoughts, story ideas, & insomnia

I go through random bouts of insomnia which are almost always fuelled by too much information packed into my brain.

It generally happens after I've spent a concentrated amount of time devouring books or watching an eclectic/unrelated horde of documentaries.

Last night, my brain linked up "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "1001 Nights", "Jaws", and a some random fable/tale I vaguely recall, but don't know the origin of, involving whales... and one of the flash fiction snippets I wrote last year on my Skullduggery site.

Me thinks this means my brain is tired of edits and is stretching its muscles in preparation for new writing.

Me also things I am insanely tired this morning and 2 cups of coffee is merely lubricating my creaking neurones, not actually jump-starting them.

...and this is also probably why my story ideas are often a little off the beaten path.

...like Project #7, the "shoe story" involving a consignment store, world mythology, alcohol, and magic shoes.

I'm not sure which is weirder.

But for now, I think I'll stick this new strange idea into a dark corner of my head and let it sit there for a while, either to fade-out, or to gobble up new ideas/thoughts until it's a behemoth that demands it be written.

3 comments:

  1. Heheh. My current project is for someone's prompt-a-day- challenge. This is the second time they've done it, and for the last time I did a weird sci-fi story, so I figured I'd do one this time as well (only without a LOT of time jumps 'cheating' things a bit) and actually set out with a plan in mind. It was inspired by early morning/late night thoughts about unethical experiments on humans and Mecha in Japanese anime and the things nations got away with in the name of 'patriotism' during the cold war and the various eugenics narratives espoused over the years.

    Also my pondering on how the youth of pilots in mecha is probably explained in universe as either elasticity of the childhood mind and/or a size issue. So I got to thinking about them using older kids (late teens, though the story might never specify that) and then inventing a new kind of mecha, but the pilots still needed to be compact.

    So the one character ends up having his arms and legs removed. To make for a compact pilot. And that's just the opening bit of squick. I don't seem able to write sci-fi without having very, very bleak premises to stories .....

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    1. Uhm, yeah... 'squick' is probably a good word for that...

      But, if you've ever watched the classic Japanese anime 'Evangelion', you'd know "bleak" is not just your house to play in :)

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    2. I haven't, actually, though I know a fair bit about it via friends. (Like the magical girl genre, the only mecha anime I tend to see are those that are deconstructions of the genre...) The fun part is that the story clashes with my sense of 'damn it, haven't there been enough dystopias?' so the backstory involves how -- pre Giant War Between Nations -- things were pretty utopic, and is actually going to end that way. Well. If you consider the entire human species being turned into gaseous entities optimistic. The main characters will certainly think so :)

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Type me out a line of Shakespeare or a line of nonsense. Dumb-blonde-jokes & Irish jokes will make me laugh myself silly :)