Story Ideas – Page 4 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Trapped in a parking garage and other late night story ideas

I had a weird idea for a story yesterday. I went to the library and parked in the underground parking lot of the JFSB, and when the library closed at midnight, I came back and found the garage completely empty. I was on the bottom floor, but forgot that the exit is only on the second floor, so I drove to where the exit should have been and found myself looking at a sign that said “NO EXIT.”

This made me wonder…what if you were trapped in an underground parking garage that, for some inexplicable reason, had no exits? That the more you tried to find one, the more lost you’d become. And it was completely empty? And it was night?

Also, today at work I had an interesting idea–how to turn telepathy into a reality. First, design a computer interface that connects directly to the human brain, without the need for a keyboard or a mouse or anything else. Next, surgically implant these computers into people, and connect the computers to the internet. You could open an IM box and chat with people directly, mind to mind.

Of course, you would still have to use words and language, since your mind has to translate your thoughts into words, which the computer can process into data, which the other computer can interpret as words, which the other person can then understand. Still, it would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Imagine the ability to IM anyone at any time, directly through your brain…

…holy cow, I would never get anything done!

Anyways, it’s WAY past my bedtime (my self-imposed bedtime, I’ll have you know, which unfortunately I have not been imposing nearly enough on myself. That will have to change in the near future).

Interview with a character

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. Or anywhere else.

Things are going well. I’ve been writing steadily this past week, and it’s going swimmingly well. I’m really, really excited for the novel I’m working on right now! I’m about 12,500 words into it right now, and my only frustration is that I can’t write it down fast enough.

That’s not to say that I don’t put off writing each day. I always tend to put off the things that take real effort, and it really frustrates me. Something personal I need to work on: self-discipline. Well, don’t we all.

English 318 has been particularly motivating. Every time I listen to one of Brandon Sanderson’s lectures, it’s like my fingers start to itch and all I really want to do is sit down and write! He has a lot of really good advice, insightful ideas and perspectives, and it’s just really great to be taking this class from him. This has got to be my favorite class at BYU, hands down.

Well, today we talked about character, and I had this really cool idea to sit down and do an interview with one of my characters, to try and flesh them out a bit. When I got home, that’s what I did–I put myself on the Catriona, the ship he’s flying on, and had a little chat with him.

Of course, I skipped ahead a little bit–this isn’t where the story actually is at this point, it’s where it is in my head–and, well, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about anyways because you haven’t read what I’ve written so far. Perhaps none of this will make any sense. However, it was a fun exercise, so I thought I’d put it up here. Enjoy!

I’m here on the Catriona right now, sitting next to James McCoy on the command bridge. We are somewhere out in deep space, well beyond the heliosphere of Karduna Prime, on our way to the first station of the Karduna-Gaia Nova starlane. Except for the two of us, there is nobody else around for literally millions of miles. James, welcome.

Thanks, Joe. It’s good to be with you.

I know this isn’t exactly the best time for you, what with your brother and sister getting kidnapped and all.

Well, maybe it isn’t, but here you are.

Yeah (after all, it’s not like things are going to get any better for you <cough>). Well, to start off, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?

Ok. Um, let’s see…I was born on the Colony, a mining station out in the Trojan asteroids just behind Kardunash III. My mom and dad are space traders–local traders, not the interstellar kind. I have a brother and a sister…

What about yourself? What can you tell me about yourself?

Well…I just finished general schooling at the colony, and was just about to start my apprenticeship with the McLellan family when this whole big mess with the Hameji happened.

What did you want to do for your apprenticeship?

I don’t know…my sister went into communications and programming, and my brother did deep space astrogation and business…I guess he wants to go off and start his own trading business, a deep space trader. But me? I haven’t figured that out yet.

I know the Hameji invasion has been pretty hard on you.

Yeah, it has.

What are you going to do about it?

I’m going to sell this ship, hire some mercenaries, and rescue my brother and sister, that’s what I’m going to do.

Sounds dangerous.

I know it does. I know it is. I’m going to do it anyway, though–or die trying.

They say that no captives have ever escaped from the Hameji. What do you think of that?

I’m still going to try. If I gave up now, how could I live with myself? Besides, there are a lot of legends about the Hameji. You can’t trust them all–they’re human beings too, just like the rest of us.

So you’re not worried?

No, I’m worried. To be honest, I’m scared out of my mind. I’m just not going to let that stop me.

So when something’s wrong, you like to take action?

I suppose. To be honest, I never really thought of it that way until the invasion. Then again, I was always the youngest child. Everyone always seemed to take action on my behalf, not the other way around.

How do you feel about being the youngest child?

Well, (don’t tell anyone, will you?), I sometimes feel that I don’t get enough respect. I mean, I’m seventeen years old, I can take care of myself, but everyone still acts as if I’m the little kid brother. My Mom clings to me whenever I’m back home, my Dad always gives the real work to my siblings, Ben always treats me like a little kid…it’s tough. I don’t like being the youngest.

You didn’t mention Estella in that list. How come?

Estella is…well, she’s different. We get along really well. I feel like I can talk with her. Ben is a good brother, and we get along and all, but I sometimes feel as if he looks down on me a little. But Estella, she’s really close. She understands me.

What makes you say that?

She likes to talk a lot. Ben likes to torment the both of us sometimes. I mean, we’re really close to him too (I mean, he’s our brother), but it’s different. Estella used to come to me with her problems while Ben was starting his apprenticeship. She was really scared about graduating and leaving the family. We got really close back then, and I shared a lot with her.

What about before her graduation?

Well, I always felt like I needed to take care of her. She’s my older sister, but back home at the colony, men are definitely the ones who wear the pants. Women can vote, but men do all the dirty work while the women take care of the home. Men are the protectors. I guess that makes me and Ben Estella’s protectors–at least until she finds a husband. If I get her back.

Yeah. . So, how do you feel about your brother Ben?

He’s my older brother. We used to fight a lot, but always good naturedly. He left for his apprenticeship when I was still in my early teens, so I haven’t seen him a whole lot since then. When I have seen him, he always tends to be in charge. He’s gotten a little bossy recently, actually. But I still love him. I’m sure he’s taking care of Estella, whereever he is.

How do you feel about the Hameji?

I hate them. They’re monsters. I wish I could drive them out of this system by myself.

If you could have any wish, what would it be?

To get things back to the way they were before the invasion. I feel like my life just sort of stopped on that day, and I’ve been wandering around somewhere else trying to get back. I hate it. I want my brother and sister back. I want things to return to the way they were.

But if that’s impossible, what will you do?

(long pause). I don’t know. It probably is impossible. But if I can’t get my brother and sister back, I might as well die with them myself.

Yeah. So…life kind of sucks for James right now. Hehe. Sorry, James. My goal with your story is to make the reader cry. Needless to say, things are only going to get more difficult for you.

But one thing I can say is that it will be worth it in the end. At least, I think it will be. I haven’t quite gotten there yet.

Oh, and I can’t have you making the story all boring with your melancholy. You’ll meet up with someone very interesting in a little while. Her name is Danica, and she’s the captain of a band of mercenaries. She’s killed at least half a dozen people with her knife and bare hands, and she’s got a bounty on her head that’ll keep her out of civilized space for many, many years to come.

Oh yes, it will be interesting when you run into her. It’ll be more interesting to see what happens to you both when she becomes your mentor.

Idea: hibernation

I had an interesting story idea today.

It came to me in the last few hours of work at the writing lab. I was dead tired, and started thinking about how awesome it would be if I could carry over sleep from one night to the next. You know: sleep 12 or 16 hours on the weekend in order to be awake for two or three straight days without getting tired.

I started talking about it with my coworkers, and from there we took it even further. What if you could hibernated for two or three months and spend the rest of the year completely awake? That would be pretty sweet.

So then, I started thinking: what if there were an alien species that actually operated this way? Their life cycle would probably evolve around the seasonal weather cycles of their home planet, so they would hibernate in the “winter” and spend the rest of the time awake.

Before they developed enough technology to be able to control their environment, the entire society would have followed this cycle. Everyone would hibernate roughly simultaneously, and spend the rest of the time awake. With new technological developments, however, the cycle would be broken up, with aliens coming and going out of hibernation as they chose.

How would this affect society? How would they have to structure their economy, their community, and their other social functions? How would this affect their relationships with each other, if for three months out of a year these aliens would just sleep? How would this complicate their military? How would it affect their colonization of other worlds?

This is not a very well developed idea at this point, but it’s a good launching point. Besides, it’s just kind of cool. If I could have a superpower, it would be the ability to go indefinitely without sleep and not suffer any physiological consequences.

The Mongol hordes…in SPACE!

A while ago, I wrote a post on this blog about what we were learning in History 240 about the Turks, the Seljuks, and the Mongols. Fascinating stuff! Really epic! Genghis Khan, Tamarlane, Tugril Beg, and all the rest of those guys may have been bloody, totalitarian rulers, but they did some incredible stuff, especially Genghis Khan and the Mongols. When the sky god Tengri says he has given the world to the Mongols, and the Qiriltai elects you leader of the Mongol tribes, who can fault you for stepping up and facing your destiny?

This last semester was generally miserable, but I still remember the class lecture on the Mongols and how I sat there, eyes wide, thinking to myself “holy cow! This would be so cool as the backdrop for a novel!” I’d love to read a historical novel set in this world, but since my passion is science fiction, I immediately started trying to figure out what sort of a culture would be analagous to the Mongols in a far future galactic empire.

Here’s what I came up with. I’ve been meaning to write about this for months and months, but just haven’t got around to it, but I still remember my ideas very well.

First of all, this culture would develop on the fringes of sedentary civilization. That much is obvious. The Mongols developed out on the steppes, and the space Mongols (I’m just going to call them Hameji, since I’ve already started to incorporate this idea into Hero in Exile) would develop out on the fringes of explored space–unsettled, unterraformed planets, asteroid fields, comets, etc.

The Mongols were nomads, highly mobile, with an economy centered around horses and cattle. Similarly, the Hameji would also be nomads, living in spaceships instead of planetary colonies and orbital stations. Their economy would be based on building and modifying spaceships; just as the Mongols were master horsemen, the Hameji would be master pilots and mechanics.

The Mongols had a secret weapon that gave them a clear offensive advantage: the highly mobile horse archer. Similarly, the Hameji would also have a military advantage: close range gun modifications that they could cheaply and easily attach to any ship, civilian or military. Just as the proportion of Mongol warriors per total population was much, much higher than any other culture (due, in part, to their horse based economy), so the proportion of Hameji warriors to total population would be incredibly high. Basically, every Hameji ship is a warship.

Things got really interesting, though, when I started imagining what the social dynamics of the Hameji would be like.

First of all, the Hameji are extremely authoritarian. That much has to be clear, given their spacefaring nature. When you’re on a spaceship, everyone has to work together, willingly or otherwise. There are so many complicated operations that have to be performed precisely in order to pilot and maintain a spaceship: engines, power, navigation, life support systems, food and hydroponics, sensors–it’s so complicated. What’s more, everyone has to work together; the guys in the engine room can’t do their work without the guys in the power plant, the navigator can’t do his job if the guys in the engine room and the deep space sensors aren’t doing theirs, and nobody can work together if life support isn’t doing its job. Something has to keep all of these guys in line, otherwise an accident or an unexpected attack could kill everybody.

In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, intra-ship unity was maintained by a system of cultural norms and values that restricted individual freedoms and required painful sacrifices for the good of the community. But basically, it was rule by strict tradition. With the Hameji, tradition definitely plays a role, but besides that, the rule of the captain is absolute law. Heinlein’s space traders were just trying to stay alive; the Hameji are trying to conquer and subjugate the known universe. They need an absolute ruler to keep things in line.

Since authoritarian figures play such an important role in their society, the Hameji don’t believe that all men are created equal. They believe in a ruling class and a following class. Those who command the spaceships are, in the minds of the Hameji, more human than those who merely follow orders.

Because of their nomadic roots, the Hameji despise the sedentary planet-born. Just like the Mongols, they consider the “civilized” city/planet dwellers to be soft and weak, like cattle, devoid of true strength and honor. Because those who cannot command spaceships are less than human, they think nothing of killing off planets wholesale, using mass accelerators to smash them into the stone age with asteroids and space rock. Just like the Mongols swept the world, burning cities to the ground, so the Hameji sweep across the galaxy, annihilating entire worlds.

You could think of the Hameji as bloodthirsty and evil, but really, they have to be aggressive in order to survive. They have to capture new spaceships in order to provide space for their growing population, first of all, and that means that they have to do a lot of raiding and killing. Since all of their neighbors have to do the same thing to stay alive, the Hameji learn to be quite good at what they do.

Mongols in space. How cool is that? It’s definitely got potential, I think. I was going to throw it into Hero in Exile as yet another setting element, but now I’m thinking about writing a story with this as the main, driving conflict. We’ll see which one ends up getting written. It’s all on the back burner until Genesis Earth and The Phoenix of Nova Terra get written.

Bring, brang, brung

Ok, I have an idea for a language system. Well, really, it’s not much of a language system, just a quirk that if done right could make one character feel like they’re from a different place/culture. Or…it could make them sound very childish or annoying. Regardless, here it is:

I work at the FHSS Writing Lab, and when we don’t have much going on (like now, as I write this), I sit around doing online grammar lessons. The one I was working on today had to do with irregular verbs, and their present, past, and “have” forms. For example:

ring, rang, rung

as in, “I ring the doorbell,” “I rang the doorbell,” and “I have rung the doorbell.”

Well, what if you changed all these verbs to make them regular–or at least, to make groups of them regular? Could you use this principle to form a useful dialect in a fantastic world? Here are some ideas:

ring, rang, rung
think, thank, thunk
weep, wept, wupt
swing, swang, swung
strike, strake, struck
sting, stang, stung
sting, stank, stunk
bring, brang, brung
teach, taych, tawch
sweep, swept, swupt
tell, tale, tole
sleep, slept, slupt
sit, sat, sut

Etc. Or you could try and do some other rule, like bring, brought, brought to run, rought, rought. But I’m finished working now, so I’m going to take off and leave that to you to figure out.

Destiny

A couple of weeks ago, we started learning about the Seljuk Turks in History 240 (History of the Middle East to 1800). This band of rugged, horse-riding nomads went from mercenary warriors of some Persian dynasty to the de facto rulers of nearly half the Muslim world. In an era when radical Shi’ism swept across North Africa and the Levant, and people thought the rise of the Fatimid Empire marked the end of the world, the Seljuks, self-appointed defenders of Sunnism headed the Fatimid conquest at Baghdad and pushed them back to Egypt. Fascinating stuff!

Then we learned about the Mongol invasion and the sack of Baghdad in 1258, when the world really DID end from the point of view of the Arabs, and I knew that Central Asia would never be boring to me again.

The Turks and the Mongols were both nomadic peoples who lived on the steppes of Central Asia–basically, an enormous stretch of grassland like the prairie in the American Midwest. These guys lived in camps, with their cattle and horses, and looked down on the thought of settling down in cities and living a civilized, sedentary life. To them, the nomadic life meant freedom–the people of the cities were voluntary slaves and beneath the hardy nomads.

Genghis Khan, born Temujin (“Genghis Khan” is a title that basically means “ruler of the world”), united the Mongol tribes and built the largest empire the world had ever seen. Bigger than Alexander’s Hellenist Empire, bigger than the Roman Empire, bigger than the Babylonians, Assyrians, Sassanians, Umayyids, or Abassids. The Mongol Empire was BIG–it stretched from Korea to the Black Sea! If it weren’t for the Mameluks (one of the few Arab kingdoms that wasn’t mismanaging itself to death), the Mongols might have swept North Africa and the Mediterranean!

The coolest part of the story was the religious justification behind Genghis Khan’s ruthless, bloodthirsty conquest. When Temujin was a young boy, the shaman of his tribe told him that the great sky god Tengri had given Temujin the world. By conquering millions of people, massacring hundreds of cities, and building an empire of blood, death, and fire, Genghis Khan was only fulfilling his destiny!

For the last few weeks, I’ve been practically obsessed with all this history. It’s fascinating! Like reading a really good novel–except it’s real life! Orson Scott Card often says that anyone interested in becoming a writer should study history instead of English in college, and I can see what he means.

All this stuff I’ve been learning about the Mongols has given me dozens of story ideas, many of which I plan on including in my current novel, Hero in Exile. I’ll write a separate post to explain it all, but basically it involves the Mongol Empire in space. Just like the Mongols considered themselves the only free people in the midst of sedentary urban dwellers, so the Hamejis in my novel (a spacefaring people who live entirely in their spaceships) consider themselves free in comparison with the billions of people living under continent sized domes across nearly a hundred settled planets. Just as the sky god Tengri gave Temujin the world, so the god of the epistellar jovian in the Hameji home system has given them the universe. It is their destiny to take and rule it by blood and fire. Bwahahaha!

(photos taken from Genghis Khan II by Koei, a 90s DOS game)

Speciation of the sexes–what the crap is this?

Ok, I just had a crazy idea come to me like five minutes ago, and since I’m here at my computer, I’m going to write it down.

You know how we sometimes say that men and women are practically members of two different species? Well, what would an alien race look like if that were actually the case? What if the males of the species looked so indistinguishably different from the females that, to a human observer, they were two distinct different species?

Of course, this is a question that has been asked many times before. Just now, though, I had a really weird idea that might lead to a new take on the question: what if the males got pregnant with the males of the species, and the females with the females?

The males would have short lifespans and reproduce very frequently, with very large litters. They would only have to have sexual contact once to get pregnant. The females, on the other hand, would have very long lifespans and bear only one offspring at a time, with a very long gestation period. They would have to have sexual contact multiple times, possibly from multiple partners, in order to acquire the genetic material to reproduce.

But wait? In this reproductive cycle, who’s the “male” and who’s the “female?” Couldn’t it be the other way around? Or really, can our human concepts of gender even describe this species–or rather, these two species?

What would a society of these beings look like? What kinds of gender roles would arise from this kind of a life cycle? What kind of philosophy would arise from it? What kind of society?

I haven’t written a lot of science fiction with alien species, but this idea is cool enough that I just might have to do it sometime. What’s your take on this idea?

Ottoman airships

I just had a REALLY cool idea. It comes from an unhealthy combination of Girl Genius (one of the coolest steampunk stories I’ve ever read) and too many classes on the history and humanities of the Middle East.

What if blimps, dirigibles, and airships were invented in the Middle East before flying machines ever came to Europe or America? What if airships thrived and became an integral part of the culture in that part of the world, instead of declining after the advent of airplanes and dramatic disasters such as the Hindenburg accident?

How would our world be different? Would I get to fly in giant, luxurious airships? Would the Middle East have experienced a renaissance instead of the steady decline it has seen since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt? Would Napoleon have even been around to invade Egypt?

I suppose it makes more sense to think of the airship as a potential invention of the Ottoman Turks, instead of, say, the Abassid Caliphate back in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I mean, the Ottomans had gunpowder, and the age of steam wasn’t that far away. I’m not sure what technology is prerequisite for the building and operating of airships, but it seems that those are two that would go with it. After all, an airship has to have some measure of self-propulsion (steam) and a means for providing massive amounts of helium or hydrogen gas, which infers a knowledge of chemistry that is probably advanced enough to produce something like gunpowder. Then again, I’m not an Engineer and I really don’t know.

But how cool would that be?? Ottoman airships, decorated in all the ornate arabesque patterns and inscriptions of the mosques of those ages. Emperors, princes, sultans, caliphs, and oriental courtiers all in their luxurious flying palaces. Turkish merchants and warlords commanding fleets, caravans, and armies of the air. A renaissance Europe dominated by these fearsome dirigible armies, then mastering the technology on their own and turning against their Turkish and Arab conquerors. The Age of Discovery, not by sea, but by air, as intrepid explorers such as Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci commanded their expeditions by airship and discovered the New World from their dirigibles.

I love airships. The next novel I write (after I’m finished with the three I’m working on) will probably be a steampunk fantasy. Will I use this idea? I have no idea. It sounds more like speculative fiction than pure fantasy, but who knows?

Whatever it is, I think it’s a really cool idea! What do you think?

Posting story ideas

My friend Steve posted a comment on my last post that I thought was deserving of a post all to itself. He said:

Joe,
If you have a good idea, you shouldn’t put it up on your website, man. Someone is gonna’ steal it. Take your flower idea and hoard it, man. Because, I’m gonna’ be honest with you, Victorian women using flowers to fight with in that punk setting is awesome. And you need to protect your kids, dude.

I can understand why people would be wary of sharing their best story ideas in a public place. For a long time, that was my philosophy as well: that good ideas should be hoarded and protected, lest anyone should “steal” them and run away with all the credit.

However, I know what I’m doing. My perspectives have changed, and I have several reasons for posting my story ideas up here publicly. Here are a few of them:

1) Ideas are cheap.

There are a ton of really good story ideas floating around in the sf/f publishing world. In English 318, Brandon Sanderson said that any given editor sees dozens of fascinating, imaginative, stupendous ideas in any given day. The thing that gets you the contract, though, is the quality of your writing. There are just so many amazing story ideas out there that even the most amazing ideas are relatively common.

2) Everyone has a different take on the same idea.

Two authors, writing essentially the same story, will come at it so differently that both books will be unique. Heinlein’s take on space travel is very different from Frank Herbert’s or Arthur C. Clarke’s, and Haldeman’s take on galactic war and colonization is radically different from Scalzi’s. Trantor is not Coruscanth, and Arrakis is not Tatooine.

All these story elements, though based on similar ideas, differ radically from each other because each author had a different take on things. When we write fiction, we bring all our personal beliefs, values, experiences, and perspectives to the story, whether consciously or subconsciously. It’s unavoidable. And since all of us are unique and different, so long as we’re honest in our writing our stories are going to reflect that uniqueness.

I’m not afraid of someone “stealing” my ideas because I know that my approach is different enough that my stories (so long as they’re honest) will be very different.

3) It takes several ideas, combined in a unique way, to make a full novel.

I used to think that you could write a novel based off of two or three really good ideas. Maybe that’s why I never finished anything. I’ve learned over the last year that, in fact, it takes somewhere around fifteen or twenty ideas, minimum, to come up with a good story. And that’s just for starters. Once you sit down and start writing it, new ideas erupt as the story progresses, and you find yourself taking things in unplanned directions. Adjusting your plans and integrating the new ideas with the old ones is part of good writing.

Brandon Sanderson said this in English 318, and I believe it: a novel is not found in the ideas by themselves, it’s found in the synergy that happens as you combine them together. As ingredients, your ideas may be powerful by themselves, but when you combine them together, the end result is much more powerful than the mere sum of them all. It’s all in how the ideas intermix.

4) Ideas grow and develop when you bounce them off of other people.

I do not believe that story ideas are static. They are not like Lego blocks that you stack together to make a construct. They are dynamic–they change and grow over time, like plants in a garden. If you take a plant and hide it in a closet, it will die. Similarly, I believe that if you “hoard” your story ideas, showing them to nobody and putting off writing them until you can write the best novel possible, those ideas will become weaker.

I tried to hoard one of my story ideas a few years ago, thinking that it was the best idea I’d ever come up with and that I needed to wait until I was experienced enough to include it in my magnus opus. Now, the idea doesn’t even interest me that much. I’ve grown, but the idea hasn’t, and I’ve moved on to other things.

My goal in sharing my story ideas here on this blog is to bounce them off of other creative minds and start a discussion. From that discussion, I think that my ideas will grow and become stronger. Other people often see things that I miss, and their take on things can really spark my imagination and help me to take my ideas to a new level. Discussing my ideas, not hoarding them, is what I need.

5) It’s easier to lose a notebook than it is to lose data stored on your website.

This last idea is purely practical. I keep a notebook with me at all times and scribble down story ideas in it as they come to me. Over the summer, I lost a notebook that I’d been keeping for several months. It had maybe thirty or forty story ideas in it, and now those are lost. From that, I learned the importance of keeping a backup. This website, in a way, is my backup.

So those are the main reasons why I’ve decided to blog about my story ideas and make them public. If my story ideas inspire you, then by all means go ahead and run with them. We live in an open source world, and besides, your take on the idea is still going to be very different from mine. And if you have any thoughts to share, please do! I welcome comments, especially for these posts on my story ideas. My goal is to bounce ideas off of you as the reader, because interaction is one of the things that makes blogging so useful.

Flower magic

Alright, here is a really cool idea for a magic system that I came up with while hanging out with friends. I have no idea exactly how it came up, I just know that it did.

What if you had a magic system that was based entirely on flowers? I just don’t mean recycled My Little Pony or Carebears or something cheesy like that–I mean a thoroughly researched, methodical magic system based on different colors, varieties, etc of flowers.

I don’t know how exactly it would work, but I think that there would be special women with enhanced powers based on their names. For example, a woman named “Rose” would have an enhanced ability to use the magic associated with roses. Or perhaps the women would only have the ability to use the magic associated with the flower of their name.

The specific powers of each variety of flower would correlate with their symbolic meanings. One would drain magic from the flower itself, so that once the magic was spent, the flower would wilt. Thus, the “flower mages” would have to keep different kinds of flowers in great abundance to be able to use their abilities. Since flowers wilt quickly after they’re cut, people would only be able to use their powers in certain seasons, when the flowers are in bloom. Also, it would be hard to use massive amounts of this magic when traveling, unless the particular flower is abundant in the wild.

At the same time, perhaps it would make it interesting to say that each person has the ability to rejuvenate a particular variety of flower as well. Thus, one could drain certain varieties of flowers, but through meditation or some other ability could cause other varieties to flourish and thrive. Thus, natural alliances would form between people of different abilities, based on the growing seasons of different flowers.

To be really cool, you’d have to really do your research for this. I mean, you’d have to know all the different varieties of flowers, their colors, growing systems, scents, etc, and their symbolic meanings. But if the research was solid, this could be REALLY cool.

Esh Raykom? What do you think?