Urban Fantasy
So my family tricked me into watching Frozen, and I could not stop imagining people with different powers learning that Arendelle had become a sanctuary from the witch-hunts.
Once again, I spent the next few months accidentally coming up with surprisingly intricate plot details, but I swore to myself that I would not start another fanfiction until I was finished writing the Doctor Who one.
Which just lead me to wonder if I should File Off the Serial Numbers (yes, that is an actual fanfiction term. Our apologies as a community, by the way, for
50 Shades of Grey) and put my personal characters into a fantasy world of my own creation that I could publish professionally. I came to the conclusion that my initial cast of characters worked better in the Frozen-verse, but I kept trying to come up with other characters that
would work in an original fantasy world.
Then I found myself wondering if I should write a Dungeons & Dragons novel like R. A. Salvatore (not entirely sure where this came from, actually), so I played around with some character concepts that I came to love, and I realized that I would also love to see Dungeons & Dragons mechanics applied to an Urban Fantasy world instead of the standard Medieval fantasy.
I also realized that there was no way that this could happen either, but that I could take the characters and the Urban setting and, once again by Filing Off the Serial Numbers, introduce a couple of the mythical species from what had been my Medieval fantasy world.
The Dire Werewolf was easy enough to turn into a human/psoglav shapeshifter, but I had trouble with the Half-Orc until I realized what the theme of my world would be:
Humans are the only intelligent species that evolved on Earth naturally, but for all of human history: sometimes a shapeshifting mage would create a new species, and storytellers would be inspired to create myths about characters of this new species; sometimes a storyteller would create a new species, and a shapeshifting mage would be inspired to recreate it in the real world.
Well established species, like mermaids, harpies, psoglavi... have been around for so long that there's nobody left alive who still remembers whether it was the mages or the myths that came first. Orcs, on the other hand, are such a recent species that everybody still remembers that it was the storyteller who inspired the mages.
But I still didn’t have a
story about any of this.
I had characters that I loved
*My lead heroes were: the “werewolf” and half-human half-orc, both sworn magical knights of a militia force. Both were lesbian, yet not remotely interested in one another (their parents tricked them into going on a blind date as teenagers because they were such good friends. The half-orc claims to still have nightmares)
*My lead villain was: a vampire who called herself “Nemesis” and who had started a cult of vigilante serial killers because she wanted to be remembered as the most terrifying supervillain of all time, a level of predator so far above all others that she could only prey on other predators.
But I couldn’t come up with anything for them to
do.
…
On a completely non-SFF note, I accidentally came up with a bank robbery scenario at around the time I finished my Doctor Who story:
A crew are casing a bank for a “job.” They’d planned on robbing a different one, but it got blown up by an as-yet unknown terrorist before they had a chance. When they’re about to leave, an FBI agent walks in.
She announces that the FBI received a manifesto that the bomber would like them to share with the public: the first explosion had been a dry run, a hostage had been
told he would be starring in a
30 Minutes or Less scenario where he was strapped into a suicide bomb vest, taken to a bank, and that he would tell the bank to give him money or his kidnapper would blow them up, but then the bomber blew him up as soon as he got in the building.
If the hostage’s demand had been the first anybody had heard of the bomber, then they’d probably take the chance of calling the police to defuse the bomb instead of cooperating [I later found out that this had been attempted in real life several years before the movie was made, and that this is exactly how it happened].
Now that everybody knows that the bomber is serious, she can send her next hostage with full knowledge that the bank won’t dare take the risk of not cooperating. “At this point, I should hope that the cleverer among you have pieced together that I am not actually here on behalf of the FBI.”
She announces that anybody can feel free to call the police if they like, but that she has already taken her next hostage, and if she does not return to the hideout with food, then a wife and mother will die alone in terror and her husband and children will have to bury an empty casket. “You may think that interrogators may be able to get on my good side, but I just walked into a bank and announced myself to be a megalomaniac Bond villain, does that sound like somebody who can be negotiated with? If I find myself in a police station, I would kill myself in a heartbeat just to get the thrill of knowing that one last victim is going to die without me there to save her. If the bank wants her to live, then they have one week to get a duffel bag full of 100s together. Any questions?”
At which point one of my original bank robbers raises his hand and asks if she’s stalking him and his friends. His boss smacks him in the back of his head, but he already has the bomber’s attention, and she gets him to admit that he had planned on robbing a bank, that it blew up, and that he was in the middle of casing the second bank, and now here’s the terrorist who blew up the first one.
The bomber finds that hilarious and forces the crew to join her in her evil lair. They find out that she doesn’t even care about the money, she just loves reading about the most terrifying psychopaths in American history and wants those same books to be written about her one day.
… But I didn’t have a
story about what happened next, so I put this on the back-burner too.
A couple of weeks later, I’m going back to my vampire supervillain Nemesis and trying to work out a story about her. I’m thinking “vigilante” might not be the thing she wants to be famous for: she’d be threatening other murderers, but she’d also be protecting their intended victims, and she wanted to scare the living daylights out of everybody who knew about her.
Next thing I know, three simple words are punching a hole into my brain and giving me the novel that I am now 38,505 words into:
She’s the bomber.
Putting my bank robbery scenario
into my Fantasy world gave me a story about my bank robbers discovering the supernatural for the first time when their job gets hijacked by a vampire.