Well. That was moderately productive.
I’d decided that today I was going to finally hash out the plot for my contribution to that anthology I’m putting together. A couple weeks ago I’d decided my original idea just wasn’t working – it kept on wanting to be too adult – so I decided to revisit the characters from “The Eurydice Variations”. I knew when I finished that that these two felt too full of potential to not come back to.
I stared out the window of a bus, and came up with the beginnings of something involving them running a scam at a casino run by Hermes, to buy the freedom of a person who’d been turned into a tree in lieu of settling their debts. There was also going to be something about a crow who worked at said casino. This morning I did some brief research that ended in me buying a copy of a book about confidence men of the early 1900s. I put that on my iPad and headed out to Ravenna Park with the sketchbook that had all my initial notes for this story.
But what developed after reading about half of that book was also too adult for the anthology. So I put it aside, and wandered through the park some more, pondering what other stories I could riff on.
Ultimately I ended up thinking of one of the stories in the Foglios’ “Xxxenophile”, taking its setup, and going somewhere G-rated. Well, probably more PG. But not the R that the first two stories I was playing with were insisting on being. This one came together pretty quickly, and will probably be like 8-12 pages.
And then on the way home I came up with yet ANOTHER story, because I wanted to know just how this pair of wandering magical rogues got together. Looks like I’ve got fodder for anthologies for a while – these two are pretty good at writing themselves!
plus they give me an excuse to draw a sexy monster babe AND a bishi dude who goes around with his shirt off all the time.
Also I am now thinking that an interesting storycrafting exercise might be “take a book of mythology, come up with five crazy riffs on these stories”. I’m pretty sure I’ll go strange places.