broken abbey One writer's thoughts…

Becoming

A young lawyer joins a new firm. Shortly after, he begins to undergo some bizarre physiological changes. He loses his appitite, is unable to drink much of anything, and has a host of flu-like symptoms.

Not long after this begins, he recieves a package - no return address, no identifying marks. The post markings on it are in a foreign language and indecipherable. Inside he finds an unusual ring, pure silver, fashioned in the shape of a triangle with the relief image of folded hands inside of it.

Sensenbrenner Park

An old man, used up by his years of corporate loyalty. He has spent each evening leaving work late, stopping by a fountain, tossing a coin in. No wishes, no prayers, just a donation. Now, his retirement eve,the end of an uneventful day with the obligatory cake and cards, he stops at the fountain one last time. It is later than usual, nearly midnight, and he is alone by the fountain.

A young man joins him, both sitting by the fountain, and makes him an offer. A reset button, but will not disclose the price. The man takes it, and it is again his first day on the job.

Distraction

The world surrounds us with distractions. Television is a particularly sinister form, and I'm only lately coming to realize its actual power over people. Try sitting in a room with a television on and doing something else - something like read a book or (as I've often tried) writing.

It doesn't work. We are drawn to it - it stimulates us more than most other readily accesible forms of entertainment. What happens to a person when he slowly comes to realize how much he truly has been distracted by television? An awaking, a stripping away of a life he thought he had, a dawning of the futility of his own existence. Imagine living a life, and only towards the end discovering that all the memories, all the hopes and dreams, were all borrowed paraphenalia, all loaned to you from the entertainment industry. And imagine realizing that the only true person to blame is yourself - you permitted yourself to spend a life in a semi-hypnotic trace, and it's much too late to reverse the effects.

Distraction... it is a cornerstone of our society, a foundation of an entire industry.

Cabbie

After having the worst day of his life, an unscrupulous New Yorker has a difficult time making his way home. He is repeatedly lost and abused, and is haunted throughout the night by a single, reappearing cabbie that frightens him.

Magic Baby

This one is actually my wife's idea.

This couple has this baby.  The baby is very in tune to his/her parents, and it can pick up on what they wish for.  It begins granter their wishes.  Sounds a little wierd, but I remember reading once that one of the Native American tribes believes (or believed) that we are born with knowledge of the language of the gods, and that we forget it as we grow up, forgetting completely by age 4.  Interesting....

The Cat Ladies

An animal rescue group is clearing out a house where a woman and her elderly mother live in extremely unhealthy conditions, along with about 100 cats. What they find deep beneath the 50 years worth of accumulated junk and mounds of cat excrement is much more than any of them expected.

Story Lines – Introduction

Every story stems from a crisis. As readers, we are most interested in the struggles of our fellow humans. Our interest is most easily captured by bad news, stress, conflict. Not that the outcomes must be bad -- on the contrary, we love stories that depict triumph in the face of adversity. But the thing that most easily grabs us is when tension, crisis, and turmoil erupt into everyday life.

This is my list of ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Am I worried about someone stealing my ideas? No. Ideas are not finished pieces. A hundred people could write starting with the same idea and no two finished products would be alike. Feel free to use an idea from here. If you see an idea you like, run with it. If you get a finished piece from it, let me know. I'd love to read it!

This is the list I had so far prior to setting up this site. Not much, but it's a start:

• A boy and his attacker, would be kidnapper, assailant, whatever, are in a severe accident. The soul of the attacker chases the soul of the boy across a hellish landscape, possibly purgator, or some as-yet-undefined version of the afterworld. The attacker has died, but has not realized it. The boy is in having a near-death experience, and must find his way back to his body before being consumed by his pursuer.
• A man is abducted by a serial killer who is collecting 'characters' for his next novel.
• A man awakens in his small, rural town in southern Ohio only to find everyone in the town has been brutally murdered.
• A man awakens one morning to find himself in the body of another person - a serial killer.
• A man is abducted by a secret society consisting of the decedents of aliens abandoned on earth at the dawning of mankind.
• A woman psychologist is given charge of helping a John Doe recover his memory after a bizarre accident brings him to her hospital naked, alone, and without identification. The only memory he has is that he dreams the same dream every night - a dream of a stone he refers to as the 'navel of the earth'.
• A young boy and his parents are trapped in a life of rigorous routine. Each night, they go to sleep to the rythm of war drums, each day they wake, and work their farm, fearful. The father is strict, often referring to the loss of a previous child.