A Fruitful Day for Ideas

 Today turned out to be a good day to get back on the horse, or at least the beginning of getting back on it.

Since the death of my previous computer, I’ve kind of slowly gotten back to work. Looking back over everything I’ve already done this year, I see that I was busier than I sometimes allow myself to think, a lot of projects (some since lost, including the big revision project for a contest I’m reasonably sure I won’t be winning because Submittable wasn’t letting me attach the file but still somehow let me “submit,” and at the time I convinced myself it had somehow worked out despite the issues the site was having...) that were all in themselves well worth tackling, and all of which in some ways built on each other.

Anyway, one of the things that was eaten was a new vision of Collider, a long-term project a quarter century in the making that’s the first Space Corps story I ever began working on. Today I did a fresh take of the outline as I recently radically reconsidered it, building on elements I developed during Terrestrial Affairs, the novella from a few years back. It’s strange how much can change but still the basic shape remains as first begun in the mid-90s. Realizing this was possible was part of the reason I didn’t completely freak out over my computer dying and erasing the last version.

I also tackled an outline for George & Gracie, the novella I’ll be including in my Christmas poems collection this year (which is another project being revisited, with the novella being a substitute for two shorter works I lost and don’t want to rewrite). These collections are for my niece, the Burrito, although this year I plan to send the results around to family, in the hopes they might actually begin to see me as a legitimate writer (and not as “gee wiz that dude who keeps trying to make that happen,” which is the recent impression I kind of got from my dad). Anyway, it’s something I’m really excited to tackle, and will be the first thing I work on actually writing.

I also came up two other ideas today, “Kingslayer” and “Old Brown’s Daughter,” though I won’t really talk about what exactly they are here, although they reminded me about an idea I had earlier in the year, “Old Wizards,” and how much that would be fun to get back to. (“Old” being in a title twice is probably a coincidence.) These are ideas that practically told themselves when I conceived them. You don’t take such ideas lightly.

Plus today was the second day of my latest comic book scripting project, Catman/Batwoman, which nominally is a riff on Tom King’s real comic, Batman/Catwoman. It’s going to be the shortest to date, twelve script pages. But nine panel grids every page! (For those who don’t know, “Catman” is an actual DC character. The “Batwoman” indicated is actually Barbara Gordon, the original and most famous Batgirl, who has never actually been referred to as Batwoman. Except in this project. Because: symmetry.)