List: the Backburner Editiom

[norwood]

• the Doom Tree — post-apocalyptic waterless world with huge glass domospheres acting as inhabitable greenhouses most people inhabit. Massive hollow trees provide shelter for those who live outside the domes and for what animals remain. Life has to be more than this, one unusually talented young woman thinks. Inspired heavily by a dream.

• the Verge — dystopian sci-fi where nothing at all is as it seems, but nobody can remember anything different. Then a hole tears through the sky but nobody believes the mechanic who saw it, and Secret People from the vaunted Science Community sweep in and scoop the person up and into working for them. Inspired heavily by a dream.

• Northern Gothic styles — ideally short stories in an American Gothic tradition set in the northeastern US or a setting similar/familiar with that. A newish idea, but still considered on backburner.

• the Fairytale Story — solarpunk but for fantasy setting, a world in which magic is a dying decadence. One woman has more raw power than has been seen in generations but no teachers are left to help her wield it. A skilled magus offers to teach her for a year in exchange for her consideration to marry him at the end of it. But, in the meantime, he assigns her a magicked bodyguard she rapidly grows close to. Inspired heavily by a dream.

Comments

[shadoedseptmbr]

ooh, that last one sounds like great fun!

[norwood]

It does, I know! But it's troublesome—when I went to sit down and start writing narrative, I hit a block within the first five pages. It was awful. Especially because it was supposed to be my "simple linesr plotline novella manuscript to get done by the end of the year!!" and that totally didn't happen. I'm not quite sure what to do with it for now, so it's on the back burner.

[shadoedseptmbr]

I would also cheerlead the others, but I have a complicated relationship with post-apocalyptic stories that involves me hiding under a blanket and singing Winnie the Pooh until the story goes elsewhere <3

[norwood]

Aww, it's not the usual grimdark post-apocalytic in either case, if that helps? Mostly that a Big Event/Cataclysm/etc has happened but society still goes on afterward in a more broken world.

[shadoedseptmbr]

That's a lot more do-able, I think. I dealt with The Hunger Games scenario pretty well, which was "nature recovers but society changes radically" as far as post-apocalyptic categories.

[norwood]

Well, neither of thee is quite a la Hunger Games in either the society or in nature recovering.… sort of. Well. Withiut divulging too much, one has a desolate landscape that appears to have already died but life still remains if one can awaken it, and the other has a landscape that appears entirely normal to a futuristic earth, but it most definitely not what it seems behind the curtain, so to speak.

The latter might be closer to grimdark, though I still woudldn't exactly classify it as such (especially as I'm unsure quite how it ends /laughs).