The world is full of unfinished visioncloths

[dolorosa_12]

I'm happiest when my days are filled with a good mixture of stuff, and that's certainly been true this weekend. In list format, in no particular order, I've done the following:

Read so many books, in a variety of genres (about which more in a review post later in the week)

Done a variety of yoga sessions ranging from the intense to the stretchy to the restorative

Roamed the outdoor market in the rain, picking up vegetables, fruit, bread and cheese

Swum a kilometre

Pottered around on Dreamwidth, overwhelmed by, and grateful for, the response to both my snowflake_challenge posts and the return of my Friday open threads

Walked out through the muddy fens with Matthias, under clear skies

Now I've got curry simmering, fragrant on the stove, and I'm winding down, and resting.



Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.



I have a number of original fiction ideas that I've been picking away at for more years than I care to admit, and I suspect none of them will ever see the light of day. My private personal shorthand for each of these stories is:

Time-travelling celestial war with consensual angelic/demonic possession, and a woman who is the embodiment of a book in which is written the words which can unmake celestial beings

Literal capitalist vampires in an inner-west Sydney share house (I swear I came up with this idea years before What We Do In the Shadows ever existed, and my version isn't a comedy

Strict and inescapable hierarchy dystopia world

The Ravenstan Six (team of misfits save fantasy world, with bonus cities/city-states are THE BEST subtext)

Misogynistic secondary world fantasy where all magic-workers need to draw on (and drain) a human source

As I say, I can't see any of these ever being completed, but they're fun to play around with from time to time.

In terms of fanworks, I have two ideas that I've picked up and dropped over the years, both in tiny book fandoms.

One is in The Queens of Innis Lear (Tessa Gratton) fandom: a sprawling, episodic post-canon series with the title Earthsaints, following Elia, Ban, Aefa and Morimaros as they drift in and out of each other's lives, with any and all pairing configurations possible, with the ultimate aim of all four characters ending up as an OT4. I basically want to see all four characters interacting when there's less at stake, and see how they work together to remake their world.

The second is a canon divergence/post-canon AU for Galax Arena (Gillian Rubinstein), focusing on Presh and Allyman (of course), but also featuring Leeward, Fenja, Mariam and Eduardo, all of whom wind up working for Cirque du Soleil. The fic would be part trauma recovery (I have this one scene burned into my brain, in which Presh realises that a) she'll actually have safety nets and wires and harnesses to work with and b) she can actually rely on her fellow Cirque du Soleil performers, and she's completely overwhelmed and unable to cope with this realisation), part trying to escape their former captors, who are still trying to bring them down. This is such a self-indulgent idea, basically bringing together one of my favourite fandoms of the heart, and my nerdy, lifelong love of Cirque du Soleil, and I genuinely can't think of anyone other than me who would want to read it.

Briseis/Chryseis f/f fic in the Iliad fandom (to be fair, there's quite a bit of Iliad fic, but little of it focuses on those characters).

As I say, lots of ideas, neither the time nor the capacity to complete them. But I find them fun to think about.

Comments

[brokenhighways]

You have a lot of interesting ideas! It's a shame you won't be able to complete them, but sometimes just having the jdea gives you the warm fuzzies (or maybe that's just me, the perpetual daydreamer!).

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, that's basically my attitude as well.

[tjs_whatnot]

I LOVE that you have all these ideas and just get enjoyment from poking at them from time to time. That is such a refreshing take on works in progress. I think I'll try and adopt it. If nothing else, it should be fun, right, or else, what's the point?

♥

[dolorosa_12]

Exactly so. I mean, this is basically the most I've ever written about any of these things in public, ever, so it's not even as if I've got a neverending, partially published WIP that people are waiting for me to finish. They're just things that make me happy to think about from time to time.

[merit]

I figure that dystopias will come back in style /eventually/ and I'd be interested to see how the modern crop of authors would spin those tales.

Literal capitalist vampires in an inner-west Sydney share house if not a comedy, a bit on the nose? ^^

[dolorosa_12]

I figure that dystopias will come back in style /eventually/ and I'd be interested to see how the modern crop of authors would spin those tales.

Everything comes back into style eventually, and I don't even think dystopias completely went away, although the 'dystopia contrived to provide maximum angst for a forbidden love YA couple' type certainly seems to have gone away for good, at least for the moment.

if not a comedy, a bit on the nose?

So this basically came from two separate ideas:

1. A lot of people in early adulthood are working in dead-end, soul-destroying jobs for very little money and with very little hope of career progression, and many such people would probably rather spend their time doing something more fulfilling (making art, working in a job that they find more meaningful, etc) if money were taken out of the equation.
2. In settings where vampires exist (and where the version of vampires is such that being bitten by a vampire doesn't automatically turn a human into a vampire, or necessarily kill the human), it's always been crazy to me that more vampires don't set up arrangements with humans whereby they basically pay groups of humans to be their blood donors. This has always struck me as a much more practical and sustainable solution — the vampires don't destroy their source of food, there's less conflict (so a quieter unlife for all concerned), and vampires don't keep getting run out of town by hordes of angry humans who inevitably notice the piles of dead bodies drained of all blood accumulating in their city.

This then turned into a story where a pair of vampires owned a piece of prime real estate in one of the expensive suburbs around Sydney Uni, and they ended up with a bunch of blood-donating human housemates who got to live rent-free in a fantastic house, were able to do whatever kind of work they wanted because money was no longer a concern (so one was a guy who was just taking forever to do his PhD but didn't need to worry about funding running out, another was a woman who had zero ambition and just wanted to work part-time at a local cafe for the social aspect, another was an artist, and so on), and in exchange for this cushy situation the humans donated their blood to the vampires whenever needed. So, literal capitalist vampires. The problem was that I could never work out what the overarching plot was, beyond minor episodes of interpersonal drama. And then What We Do in the Shadows came out.

(There was also a Netflix film about a plucky gang of children in New York City who discovered the gentrifiers in their neighbourhood were actual vampires, literally draining the lifeblood from the area!)

[merit]

Dystopia still exists and I love a good dystopia but I tend to be very picky with the genre.

Your idea reminds me of the slice of life genre a bit! I mean, Seinfeld was a show without a plot, so. I suppose it can be done! Though kind of out of step in the golden age of television and the intense plots around.

(Gasp! almost reality)

[goodbyebird]

Very glad to see you having a rewarding time of it ❤️ A good start to the year!

I've been browsing the snowflake challenge posts today as well, and it has brought me a lot of joy. I really do love everyone in this bar.

[dolorosa_12]

I've been browsing the snowflake challenge posts today as well, and it has brought me a lot of joy. I really do love everyone in this bar.

It really is so delightful! I remember a while ago some of my friends on Dreamwidth were planning to set up an AO3 collection where they could post incomplete fic that they were never likely to finish but were still proud of and wanted to share. And some pro author friends of mine used to have a shared blog where they would post fragments of stories they were working on — fragments that were no longer going to be part of the final work. I think initiatives like that can be fun, since they mean pieces of writing which someone might have worked hard on can still get shared, even if they're never going to be completed.

[chestnut_pod]

'Fun to think about' is its own kind of joy, I find!

[dolorosa_12]

Absolutely!

[lirazel]

Your weekend sounds so lovely!

[dolorosa_12]

It definitely was!