Cooperative Story Writing

It was mid-November, late on a Friday night. The weather just turned cold and I was warming my toes by the fire, sipping scotch. I was in a creative mood and thinking about different story ideas when it occurred to me that I should see what people would like to hear about. One of the many things I like about Facebook is the ability to reach a number of people quickly and get responses to questions. So I posed the problem – I want to write a short story and need ideas on subject matter, world, setting, characters, etc. I created a very simple video, just to fool the FB gods. Turns out if you want a lot of views, FB is currently optimizing for video so video = reach.

Before you think me a genius for the FB hack – the video upload process is wonky and I ended up posting the video three times. Fortunately, I was able to trim one of them from my feed before too many people got to it, but there was no way I could merge the other videos due to comments already in progress.

The ideas I received ranged from – ‘please more Witchy World’ to ‘write a story from Filbert the missing cat’s perspective.’ Honestly, I was sorely tempted by the latter. The former is my bad as I’ve not communicated well that my current large project is that of Witchy World #3. And before you ask; release is targeted April 2016.

First, let me say all of the ideas received were great. As an author, my series are my babies and comments like ‘please more Witchy World’ brings a smile to my face. I love Felix, Amak, Gabriella and the Katty sisters. I’d love to go to Chatty Katty restaurant and have cinnamon rolls or whatever Belle would fix for me. Bottom line, is however, I need to pick an idea and run with it, but believe me, I’m stashing the other ideas for future projects.

The ideas I’m going to run with are attributable to Michael Grandy and Alison Laura Goodman with a twist of course.

Alison Laura Goodman Privateer short story: Space Barnacles.While exploring a new area, they get chased into an asteroid field, they pass through a cloud of debris that has the space Barnacles in it.

The effect is that the stealth coating on his ship is degraded and they have to understand stand why the ship chasing them always finds them.

Think a game of high tech hide and seek.

Michael Grandy I like the ones that force us to think about good/bad instead of just making it easy to separate the two. I think that smuggler/data broker was a shady character. Maybe he’s smuggling for someone no questions asked, but slowly starts to suspect he’s working for human traffickers. Does he check inside to find out? Maybe he finds he is smuggling people, and he’s not down with that, but he likes the money. … (shortened)

Oh wait, he was in on it from the start and the people he’s smuggling are just brain dead clones as bait to draw out the bad guys, but the clones aren’t brain dead.

My twist on this is to have the short story follow Jake Berandor and a yet unnamed, but you’ll know her when you see her character to be announced later. If you recall, Jake has control of Sterra’s Gift. One of the things I really like about Jake is that he isn’t as restricted as Liam is with moral boundaries. He has a moral compass, it just doesn’t point quite as straight north as does Liam’s, the question Berandor has to answer is does his compass point below the equator or not.

So now I’ll be firing up artistic genius Roberto Gabriel Garcia to give me a space barnacle cloud and a ship to go through it in the form of a short-story cover.

Stay tuned for more news.