The Young Writer’s Notebook
Ideas/Works in progress –
Fire In The Hole – UFOs over Vietnam: Maybe comic mini-series or OGN? Private Ryan meets Aliens. Full on violence with anti-war (anti-colonialism?) message. Check IMDB for movies – heavy research project.
Why? Robot (Bad title) – Man tries to commit suicide, discovers he’s a cyborg. Maybe a short film script? Or short story. Do they still publish Interzone?
Pull together poetry from last three years, do a book proposal. Call it UniWords or UniTart or First Degree Word Art.
Blog post – Watch and review six DVDs on shelf with titles beginning American or America. Compare/contrast. Check online for any others, just in case.
Short story/maybe mini-comic, about a shy guy who falls in love with girl in his shared house; she’s dating this much more popular guy who wears chains and shit, but when cool guy treats her like shit, she finds herself turning to main dude.
Western comic – maybe series of one-shots about this gunslinger who finds himself cursed by coincidence and – he’s like a vortex of stuff. Scope for supernatural, funny, even tragedy. Zeke Stone, young guy (Could go through till he’s old, maybe? Jump around timeline?)
Nanowrimo prep: Road movie/gangster story – three friends in small town America steal a car (Joyride? Road Trip? Actually to sell on?) and find it has a briefcase full of cash in boot, that turns out to belong to the mob. Heartwarming coming of age tale, maybe? Or what, crime story?
Erotica: Cute girl in student house wanders into wrong bedroom while drunk, ends up sharing bed with male housemate that she’s never really noticed before. He looks after her without making an advance all night, and in the morning she realises how great he is, and seduces him totally.
Blog post – Why Episode 1 Wasn’t As Bad As You Thought It Was.
Zeke Stone – Zeke meets a girl who turns out to be the wife of Jesse James. Through a series of events, he saves her life again and again, always just missing meeting Jesse.
Himortal! – Comic series about a guy who can’t die, but the deal is, he’s a coward and can’t fight. A cop (girl, maybe?) finds out about him and forces him to help them solve crimes. Cool scenes with healing and stuff, like he falls off a building onto scaffolding, and has to pull himself up a rod hand over hand, or he throws himself in front of a subway train to stop it setting off a bomb. Really full-on extreme stuff, like you never saw on Angel.
Maybe TV, actually? Not enough immortal shows on.
Mini-comic – Unrequited love. Young guy constantly rebuffed by girl that lives in same flats, meditates on the point of it all. Analogy: Suicide/vanishing. At the end, she comes round to apologise for ignoring him, but as she’s knocking on the door, inside there is nothing – he has dissappeared!
Blog post – Look at similarities and relationship between Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful.
Nanowrimo notes – One of the guys is going out with a girl who ends up coming along. His friends don’t like it.
Zeke Stone – Hiding out in an old coal mine – where there are zombies! The coal miners have turned feral after being down in the dark for so long.
God and the Devil meet up for a coffee: Discuss Kill Bill and politics – the reader realises that they have bumped into each other as strangers, and don’t actually recognise each other at all…
Nanowrimo notes – Girl’s dad is a big league corporate MF, and when she goes missing with the boys, he sends a badass private detective/enforcer after them. Following the same trail as the mob guys.
Short story about a temp who gets offered a permanent job at the office he works at, which he’s not sure about taking – some of the full-timers there behave strangely – turns out the manager is a vampire. Commentary on workplace and growing older.
Erotica: Guy keeps bumping into cute, slim blonde colleague in the secluded filing room at work. She is straight out of college, whereas he’s more educated, but he finds her strangely arousing. She makes a point of bumping her ass against him one day among the stacks, and they make love right there, where anyone might walk in.
Blog ideas – regular column about workplace romances, and how to make them work. Think I’ve got lots to say on the subject.
Website idea: Do a review/synopsis style thing about TV episodes, but completely fabricate the episode/what happened in it from the DVD/IMDB or TV station episode notes. FUNNY!
What If? Famous comics had been written by the artist and drawn by the writer. Mini-comics? Sam Keith writes/Neil Gaiman draws Sandman, or Gibbons and Moore on Watchmen. Mark Millar and? Hmm… come back to this…
Poem: Using filing as a metaphor for the end of a relationship/being dumped.
Nanowrimo notes: Girl ends up shagging the friend who was having the biggest problem with her. When boyfriend finds out about it, he shouts – this is how the mobsters and her dad’s bounty hunter find them, and a shootout ensues. Boyfriend gets shot dead. Girl and betraying friend are heartbroken, he gets killed seconds later, and she never recovers. Maybe? Or everyone gets killed.
Idea for new novel: Young writer tries to juggle writing with a soul-destroying job in an office, and working in the same place as his ex, and her new boyfriend. As he struggles with dark thoughts of depression etc, the whole thing is reflected through his comic collection. Thoughts for end: He gets the girl? Or, she calls him to reconcile and he talks to her, without letting on that he has taken an overdose (poignant)? Finds solutions in/problems caused by comics?
Superhero analogy?
Short comic/story? – Boy’s whole transition into manhood can be mapped through his choice of favourite drink. End – he drinks himself to death.
