Six Plots-a-Brewing

On the Sixth Day of Christmas the Book World Gave to Me...

Six Plots-a-Brewing
Five RE-JEC-TIONS
Four Steampunk Stories
Three Co-zies
Two Fabul-Agents
And the notice of a best selling book!

So I used to get book ideas, like... well the first one was the only idea for about seven years... and then there wasn't really another one... there was, but it wasn't flowing... then there was another, and it didn't flow either, and FINALLY there was one related to the first non-flowy one that set off this... it's not a landslide, but I get ideas with some regularity now... maybe half dozen ideas a year that might merit a whole book if I ever got to them. It's not enough to pull a James Patterson with them, but it's pretty good.

I notice, strangely... that four of these six are Armageddon-related... I think I am fairly worried about this. Now... I'm not worried a God-imposed Armageddon is upon us... I don't frankly believe in that, in a literal sense. My belief about the Bible is it has always been allegory—to be taken seriously, not literally. I hope that doesn't offend anyone, but I suspect anyone offended by that was already scared off by my other antics. I can agree to disagree, and be respectful, but I'm not really one to not say what I think. All things are written in culturally bound ways, and the Bible has been translated and edited by people with agendas, even if at one point it WAS meant literally (though I see it more like the tall tales from the oral tradition—there are exaggerations to prove points, etc.) But that aside, I DO believe in self-important bastards who interpret stuff in dangerous ways and will work to bring it about... and THAT is behind much of these four:


The Adult Armageddon: I've told yibus a little about this before... it involves an evil Televangelist, a reporter and a bad batch of flu virus...


The YA Armageddon: This is more a survival story.

Undoing: This is one of those fuzzy, is it YA is it adult, but about a young man from a powerful family whose disillusioned grandfather teaches him what he needs to know to undo the power structure from within... inspired by, of all things, an episode of Veronica Mars.

??? The final Armageddon one is from the perspective of a friend of a political figure who knows by revealing some secrets that he is going to be assassinated, but he manages to get information to a collection of people who must find each other and work together to stop what is happening.


In all four of those, there is a great deal of evil in the powers that be. It is also of note that none of these is Sci-Fi or fantasy... and they aren't dystopian, though they are the events that would lead to the dystopia... The funny thing is two of these ideas have been on my plate for a couple years, well before things were so clearly as bad as they are.


The other two ideas are not so related... (and I know myself well enough to know the Armageddon ones may collapse and combine)... but the final two are:

The Pleiades: I've mentioned this one before, too... a group of geeky middle school kids 'pretending' superhero qualities in order to survive their real life troubles.

And finally a twisted fairy tale about a genie who has been imprisoned for four centuries who is finally released by an arrogant, silver-spooned ninny who doesn't know how to word a wish.

So there...

Now if I can just get some of these books written before any of them come true...

Any of you have thoughts on Armageddon? Any ideas that keep manifesting themselves in new forms?