So, once again, inspiration has failed to strike.

Actually, that’s not quite correct.  I have plenty of inspiration (often coming to me at the most inopportune times, like when I’m up on top of a ladder, paintbrush in hand, and can’t exactly pull out my phone to jot down the idea, much less sit down and actually write), but none of the ideas are quite ready for short story status yet.

Or I don’t know how to write them.  See previous post on Advanced Writing Problems, Part I and Advanced Writing Problems, Part II.

But, here are a few of the ideas that have come to me, but have not yet become actual, fleshy, honest-to-goodness (or badness) blog posts.

• Pooping.  As a stream-of-consciousness narrative.  This one is actually about half written, aside from 2 problems.  Problem 1: I can only write about it when I’m in the right frame of mind, i.e. when I need to use the restroom urgently.  Problem 2: At that moment when I am in the right frame of mind, other things are of much more importance to me than writing.

• The Wire Men – men who spend their entire lives working miles above the ground, on thin wires.  They are born there, live there, and when they die, are kept, hanging, in the air.  Why are they up there?  No idea.

• A theme park in the future, where roller coasters go through portals to different dimensions or time periods!  Talk about a wild ride!

• Two brothers, Rhise and Rhun.  I’m guessing this would be a story about triangles, or at least some sort of geometry.

• A cargo inspector stumbles across a shipping container, in which is stored an illegal wormhole, maintained by the Mafia for time travel.

• That little bubble of loneliness, that comes late at night when you’re driving on a deserted road, all alone.  Will you ever escape?

• A shop of perfectly useful things that are totally useless!  An umbrella, but it only rains under the umbrella; a camera that mounts on nose hair trimmers, so you know if you got it all . . . at this point, I realized that I was describing Skymall.

• A man, trapped on a ship lost at sea, dying of dehydration and searching for water . . .

• What if a murderer stalked hedge fund managers, killing them for their stock portfolios?  With every assassination, he gains new insights into the market!  Maybe this is just what I secretly wish for.  The stock tips, obviously, not the murdering.

Not every idea that I have makes it into any sort of written form.  Many ideas are jotted down as brief thoughts or spurts, sometimes only a few words strung together or a title.  Maybe I’ll return for these later, build them into full compositions.  Maybe not.  Here’s a few currently sitting in my notes:

“The Line for Heaven” – Everybody tells you about the angels, halos, and clouds.  No one warns you about the bureaucracy.

“Under the Rainbow” – We always dream of going over the rainbow.  What about under?  What twisted, sullen worlds await?

“Tomb World” – The world is dying.  Slowly but surely.  Potentially within our lifetimes.  We cannot stop it.  What are the last actions of a stranded civilization on a dying world?

How long can a train be?  Can they stretch for miles?  What about hundreds of miles?  Could a train never have an end, separating different cities for so long that they become completely distinct entities, with only the faintest recollection of each other?

Time is a dimension we move through.  What if that dimension had life of its own?  Only time travelers would ever lay eyes on them…

“Worldshatter” – I don’t know anything about this.  It sure sounds cool though.

Inside old watches is an entire world of cogs, meshed together in intricate patterns.  What if the whole world was like that, a constantly turning maze of metal?

“The first swordsman came forward, his blade flashing and spinning, showing off his fancy footwork.  My face was blank, but I laughed inside my head.  This man had clearly never tasted battle.  I cut him down in two strokes.  His partner’s face blanched, and he retreated a step before he regained control.”

Sometimes, you’re the hammer.  Sometimes, you’re the nail.  Sometimes, if your luck is especially bad, the nail hits back.

It all began when Johnny came into lab, hair mussed and glasses askew, claiming that he could quantify love. We should have left it at that, laughed it off.  We definitely shouldn’t have built the tracking device.

“Not all the dinosaurs were lost in the asteroid’s cleansing flame.  They had a hundred million years of evolution on their side.  And some of them had learned to shift along the strings that made up quarks, leptons, gluons, and more, expanding across the stars.” We stared at the professor as he walked across the ship’s bridge, his arms raised in supplication.
The captain shrugged in his chair.  “That’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.  Now, fetch me my laser rifle – I’m going planetside to bag me a T-rex.”