oncenefarious

Two new story ideas.  I have others, but I'll keep those on the low for now since they're really disorganized ideas.

As usual, please ignore the occassional typo.

I don't know why I keep coming up with new story ideas.  I've never finished a story/book in my life, and some of them I've been working on since as far back as the 3rd and 4th grade.  But I can't help it that I come up with ideas faster than I can finish anything!

The first idea sort of came from a series of folk tales we were reading in English class today.  I was really intrgued by the idea of an excedingly wise and powerful entity with the ability to create and destroy, who, nevertheless, makes many foolish mistakes and is, in short, very human.  It's an interesting concept to have a being with nearly limitless power, who does both good and evil, drawn in to human desires and temptations, knowing human fears, hardly omnipotent, but still fundamentally one who does great work and makes it his mission to improve the world.

The result is C.  We will call him C because I want his name to start with C, but that's about all I know about him specifically.  C is...flighty, if you will.  For someone possessing as much power as he, he's surprisingly whimsical, almost to a fault.  As I said before, though C generally has good intentions, he causes a lot of mischief.  He has the tendency to whimsically stray from his objectives and cause trouble, sometimes inadvertantly, sometimes out of the deliberate and selfish want to be mischievous.  The really interesting thing about C is that though he's pretty much a god, he's not above human practices and ideals.  He takes interest in women, like a human might, and pursues fun, pleasure, fulfillment, like a human might.  Amusingly, he's not the best looking fellow in the world.  On the contrary, C is on the...ugly/strange side, but he possesses two things to counter this.  One is his charm, a sort of natural (even primarily innocent or careless) charisma, which gains him companionship among many dispite his spontaneous/thoughtless nature.  His second advantage is his ability to change form to almost anything.  He can be, among other things, vain, and enjoys being beautiful.  This is also a way of ensuring that his unfavorable looks never leave him without women when he wants them.  I would say that C is almost child-like.  Even his wrong or ammoral deeds are not committed out of malice or evil but simply out of an almost ignorant obsession with fun that occassionally leads in the wrong directions.

So, the result will probably be a series of stories, or even a series of short books, if I can ever manage that big a commitment.  So that's C.

The second idea came along in French class, when we were reading Il pleure dans mon coeur and Chanson D'automne by Paul Verlaine.  I was sort of captured by the emo-ness of the poems.  There's a very beautiful side of the French language that allows such feelings to occur without verging on melodrama.  The imagery is really fascinating.  The result is an idea that really has nothing to do with the poems themselves but rather with the power of the language and poetry in general.  

I don't know the setting, or the names of the characters yet.  The idea came to me a little more than an hour ago, so it's still in its raw stages.  The central, resulting idea of the poems I read is an assassin of sorts.  More on the evil side, obviously.  I don't know his objective yet; it's his personality that's important at the moment.  He's one of the few main characters of mine that kill without feeling.  It's unclear whether he is the antagonist or not, but he is definitely the center of this story.  In a lot of my stories, there's a bit of a twist.  Nothing dramatic, but some little something that you know is out-of-place for the main character, therefore putting them in a position to go through some sort of character evelopement, I suppose, or at least give them an opportunity to reveal their true selves to the reader, to some extent.  In this case, a girl comes into the care of the assassin.  It's interesting because it's the first time I've had a character come into the care of a villain, if that term applies to the assassin.  As far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested in the girl somehow bringing the assassin to justice, or "turning him good," or having to choose between good and evil.  I'm more interested in the assassin's personality, and I'm willing to even leave the end a bit open, showing it's more about the two characters and their interactions than trying to make some moral point.

Anyway...the "assassin."  I have absolutely no info on his appearance yet, or background, or name.  His coolest aspect?  He speaks French.  He's a man of few words, when it comes to talking to the girl.  Though the assassin shows neither pleasure nor displeasure in his obligation to look after the girl (after their relationship of keeper and ward (of sorts) becomes established), he only speaks to the girl in French.  He knows she doesn't know French, and yes, he does know English.  But he chooses only to speak in French, even when responding to the girl's English.  As I said, he's a man of few words, and will even respond to the girl with complete nonsense or riddles just to secretly make fun of her.  The resulting sort of father-daughter bond is very fascinating as the girl learns to understand him and follows him around while he does his work.  I'll leave it at that and won't spoil anything.

Let's hope I make some progress getting started on these.