And the Ideas Come Pouring In

A few days ago I was stuck for story ideas. That was probably because I'd poured the contents of my head into Merry-Go-Round. Given a few days' rest, some reading, and some thinking out loud, it's starting to fill back up again.

1. My wife wants me to write a non-fiction book on the War on Terror. I think what she has in mind is a "beginner's guide." My thoughts are more along the lines of "Best of Rantburg," which would boil down to the most ridiculous incidents, clustered around the high points. 


2. I have the title for my Great American Novel. I'm going to call it Love Among the Nudibranches. I just don't know what it's going to be about.


3. An idea I had years ago and never developed was Attack of the Baloneyoids, which featured an invasion of the earth by cannibalistic extraterrestrials who look and smell like 200-pounds of mortadella with feet. The idea is to make all the major characters maintain their illusions about each other, even past the blowoff.
   
   Sweet Cynthia retains her illusion that her dipsy doodle Professor father is a genius. Jack, the barrel-chested, cleft-chinned, ebullient hero maintains the illusion that Cynthia's not a slut who'll do most anybody of male gender and many who aren't; she's not particular about species, either, since she shows up smelling strongly of garlic a time or two. ("You like bockwurst, baby?" "How big a bockwurst?") That was just someone who resembles her you saw naked on the internet with a half dozen guys. Cynthia, for her part, maintains the illusion that Jack's leading the resistance to the invaders, rather than actually being a dolt who spends his time designing ever more garish uniforms for the resistance fighters to wear and writing plans for enormous counteroffensives that are logistically impossible.
   
   Cynthia, Jack, and the Professor all take seriously the Noam Chomsky rewrite who's convinced it's all our fault and that we should be negotiating and offering concessions to the Baloneyoids. People should be getting on those transport ships, trusting to the baloneyoids' good will. I might have him eaten after showing up at the flying saucer parking lot with a white flag and a bunch of protesters.  I'll probably have the protesters get eaten, too.
   
   The guy nobody likes and nobody trusts but Sweet Nell will be Nick, the skinny Italianate ex-con. He and Nellie are the only ones among them with the sense to blow his or her nose when his or her lip gets wet. He's the one who actually kills baloneyoids (Noam refers to it as murder), who organizes the resistance, sets up a liaison corps of similarly nondescript people, searches for the baloneyoid weaknesses, and ultimately wins the war -- for which Jack gets the credit. Nick and Nell sneak off in the end while Jack, Cynthia, and the Professor are being feted, to find a nice cottage in the Poconos and live happily ever after.


4. The other idea came to me the other evening. I wrote (and I quote): I made the heroine prettier than average (though a heroine, of course, should be prettier than average, if not gorgeous.) That set me thinking last night  on the fact that heroines might swoon, they might become dangerously ill, they may even pass away at the end of the book, though rarely, but they don't get scarred.  Their milk white skin remains unperforated except for Mina Harker, and those holes grew shut. And they never lose body parts, much less break a nail. Okay, so maybe they'll break a nail.

And then there are those pictures of the very lovely 1st Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell. There's also Kirstie Ennis. Sarah Reinertsen. And Mary Dague posing as the Venus de Milo. Spend an hour searching and you'll find a dozen more, at least. If you're ever down in the dumps watch Mary's video.

There are some inspiring stories about Wounded Warriors and the support they receive from their families and the military. There aren't enough about the support they receive from the bureaucracy-ridden VA, but most VA facilities work at it. But I also know (from hard experience) that there isn't always a "happily ever after." Lots of men can't quite accept the idea of damaged women. That's not to say that there aren't some who can, but I think an honest statement would be that most can't. Add in PTSD: She can be pretty hard to live with and divorce is probably pretty common. I've already got a stub for the story with Martin and Annie Carver from Merry-Go-Round. So I've got a hat full of characters and a locale. Now all I have to figure is what's going to happen.


5. Then there's Del of Kerao to finish. It's a science fiction tale of a man with the worst case of PTSD ever, a remnant of a defeated invasion force with no prospect of ever going home again. It's set in the same story line as Karl Redhand.
   
   All the science fiction I've ever read has assumed a future that's evolved from North America or Europe (maybe Russia). I'm postulating space colonization involving the people the earth wants to get rid of, which would be irritating pockets of non-conformity. All those little pockets would have an equal chance at growth. I've built a dominant culture that grows out of a resurgent Vedic movement in Laos, after a couple thousand years of development: Polytheistic, multicultural without the virtue-signaling smarm -- maybe I should think of it as polycultural. They speak a single Imperial language that's derived from English, but rather than using Greek and Latin roots -- no memory of Greek and Latin -- they use "Old Dai," which is Thai-Lao, their religious language. With 125 different worlds in their empire, they've got at least 125 dialects x however many major locales on each planet. Some of the dialects are mutually incomprehensible.
   
   Del tries to retire to a farm in the country after doing his service to the Loyalist regime that regrew two legs and an arm for him after he was the single survivor of an artillery strike. He meets a nice girl and her sister, and captures two bad guys who rob the ville. He saves his fiancee and her sister, and then gets blown up along with his fiancee. He survives, she doesn't.
   
   From there he's offered a job by the regime to help track down the guys who blew them up. He finds himself working as a criminal investigator with the hated, but reforming, Security Police, which was taken over by Karl Redhand in the last book. He and his partner become famous criminal investigators because Del's carrying around 250 extra minds in his head. When last seen he was in Novy Kruz. They had a lead on the revanchist assassination ring. He had been speculating on what happens to the animus or soul when people die. He and his wife, his fiancee's sister, are expecting. Contact was just being reestablished with the decadent Empire.
   
   At this point (around 65,000 words) I'm kind of stuck. I have the remaining chapter titles, I know approximately what's going to happen in each, but the words won't come together.