{"id":86,"date":"2007-11-23T22:25:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-24T04:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=86"},"modified":"2007-11-23T22:25:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T04:25:48","slug":"some-of-my-short-story-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/some-of-my-short-story-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of my short story ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alright, here are the two ideas I have right now.\u00a0 I’m not really at a good stopping point for The Lost Colony<\/em> yet, but I think I can slow down enough to divide my attention.<\/p>\n

The first one I got when I finished 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> just last week.\u00a0 I was thinking about dating and relationships, and also thinking about the last 50 pages of 2001<\/em> (which, let me tell you, are psychedelically crazy!), and the thought came into my mind that a guy and a girl getting to the point where they start up a relationship is kind of like a first contact situation with an alien species. In both situations, both sides are trying to put their best selves forward; in both situations, communication is awkward and neither side quite knows what to expect; in both situations, each side is driven to figure out what the other side is thinking, and to predict what they will do; in both situations, the stakes are very high.\u00a0 So, I thought I’d write a story which is actually two stories–a first contact story that parallels an awkward dtr, where it’s unclear whether the first contact story is real or is just happening inside the guy’s head.\u00a0 Yes, I know it’s a really nerdy story.\u00a0 Yes, I embraced my geekdom long ago.\u00a0 And…to make it more geeky, I’m probably going to need a little bit of help with this one.\u00a0 So I talked with my good friend Steve, and we’re going to collaborate on this one.\u00a0 I think it could be really funny–just like Decision LZ150207<\/em>! (speaking of which, I need to send out that story to some publishers)<\/p>\n

The other idea I have is a bit darker.\u00a0 I got the idea of it from Joe Haldeman’s Forever War.<\/em>\u00a0 I thought that the space combat in that book was very intriguing, about space battles fought across solar systems at relativistic speeds, and how the soldiers return after every combat to a very different world.\u00a0 For a few months, I toyed around in my head what a spaceship would look like that fought at such speeds, and I came up with this idea of a one man spaceship that was equipped to defend a planetary system from attack.\u00a0 And then, I thought “what would it be like if one of the pilots blacked out, was thrown out of the solar system at relativistic speeds, and by the time he came back, it was nearly a hundred years later and a peace treaty had been signed?” So now, I just need to come up with an idea for this pilot’s character, and to figure out a few more of the military details.\u00a0 And…I need to figure out what this guy is going to do after his life loses its meaning.\u00a0 He basically forsakes everything to go and become one of these pilots (since he knows that he will be flung far into the future), and the thing that compels him to do that is the urgency of this terrible war, but when something goes wrong in this battle (which he thinks is the final battle for his world) he comes back to find that the enemy that he has dedicated his life to destroy has made peace with his people, and they are now in an age of prosperity.\u00a0 He becomes a relic.\u00a0 What does he do about it?\u00a0 That’s the key issue–and I don’t know exactly how to solve it.\u00a0 I’m not exactly the person to do so, either, since I’m not a soldier and not a veteran of any war.\u00a0 But…maybe I can come up with something.\u00a0 I hope that something in my personal experience can help to suggest an answer to this soldier’s problem.\u00a0 Because I don’t want this to be a lame story where the whole point is to destroy the hero.\u00a0 I want it to be realistic, but worth reading as well.<\/p>\n

So, those are some of the ideas I have in my head now.\u00a0 I hope that more will soon come!\u00a0 And really, the thing I need to focus on now is submitting the two stories that I’ve already finished.\u00a0 I’ve been lazy on that end–too lazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alright, here are the two ideas I have right now.\u00a0 I’m not really at a good stopping point for The Lost Colony yet, but I think I can slow down enough to divide my attention. The first one I got when I finished 2001: A Space Odyssey just last week.\u00a0 I was thinking about dating… Continue reading Some of my short story ideas<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}