it's list time again
Advent Chronicles
1920s alien-infiltrated pulp murder mysteries, short stories building towards a denouement with a focus on character relations. Vague outline of main plot, no individual cases yet. Need to work out how they relate to each other and to the main arc while still freestanding. Also research on 1920s NYC and alterations based on the presence of known aliens.
Bodyswap
Weird science lesbian rom-com in which suicidal secondary school teacher Stephanie and wanted-by-two-separate-criminal-organisations-and-the-police hapless criminal dogsbody and occasional prostitute Ginger participate in a consciousness swap, which has unexpected side-effects: Stephanie's life becomes chaotic as Ginger seduces one of her Year 13 students and gets her both fired and dumped by her fiance, while Stephanie's complete lack of regard for her own safety and sense of the unreality of it all leads to Ginger becoming feared and obeyed by some of her former enemies. I don't know how to conclude this but I want them to meet and some kind of relationship to ensue.
Mainland
Originally a fanfic thing extrapolating a future for Ralph and Jack from Lord of the Flies, followed by a kind of St Sebastian analogue written for Emily involving one of Samanderic as a spy who has in theory been "killed". The world-building interests me and I like the hapless Mr Saxonbury, but I don't quite know how to finish it, and I will have to un-fanfic it.
Hooked to the Silver Screen
1950s gay BDSM romance mess set in Hollywood during the start of the McCarthyist communist witch hunts with some focus on the connections between Hollywood studios and organised crime. I have the main plotlines but need more of the side ones and need to do a lot more research, which I do at least have the books for. Am perpetually worried about my inability to root it sufficiently not only in the past but in the area, as I fundamentally do not speak American.
Parallelica
Being honest I think this is a dead end. It is mostly a huge cast and some monsters and no idea what to do with them. They can, potentially, be partially salvaged to Light City, or at least the monsters can, but a lot of the cast are very intrinsically of their place, and I don't know how to remove their cultural influences. This is a shame as I really especially like the thrown-together family unit of Diva (non-op trans lady of colour born in prison and with a complicated set of preferences in her life which she keeps complicating further: a stripper and a terrifying badass), Dita (hapless white cis lady with one adopted-out child and one kept one, a revolving door of boyfriends, and a progression from one form of sex work to another), Pooh-Bear (Dita's mixed-race daughter who is five and wants to be a biker princess and is if possible even more madly in love with the idea of having Diva as a second mom than Diva is in love with Dita, who is oblivious), Mikey Bhina (believes he is Dita's adopted out son, and manages to convince her. 14, illiterate, perpetually angry and an arsonist), and Ezekiel Lake (army deserter who had a religious experience in a cave after killing his best friend and now thinks he has a God inside him). I also kind of liked Peaches Bobbit and her gang but I feel like they are so big that they possibly need a book of their own and I don't know that they go with Light City either.
Robots
Medical student signs funding agreement for his degree without reading the small print and finds he has been assigned to an enormously boring interplanetary moss-gathering mission with the kind of useless lunatics who engage in long-distance space travel (in this U faster-than-light travel is impossible, life more complicated than moss has yet to be found on achievable other planets, and most people think anyone who chooses to live off world is a nut and they usually are right). In the course of the voyage he's killed by a malfunctioning toilet, returned to life minus unnecessary personality bits and emotions etc, then gets killed by an exploding fuel tank on landing. He is returned as a nanite cloud and has a crisis of humanity about whether or not he is still the same person, and on return to Earth is declared the property of the corporation who paid for his education and nanite cloud, and put to work in a decidedly less salubrious area than Ship's Doctor. I am of two minds as to whether the corporation want to do in his former room mate and best friend Spikey (loudmouth trans dude who has since become a powerful politician because this is the goddamn future and no one cares if you're cis or trans okay) and whether they are actually right to want to do so or not, which is fundamental to working out whether I'm telling the story of the reluctant hero or the reluctant villain.
Rock Bottom
Prequel to Curious Case of the Firecrotch which I have about 5k on and really can't be bothered with because I was writing it for Liza who has lost interest as well.
Propaganda
Short story, theoretically, about a first-free-generation propaganda-writer in the world's first republic (modelled after the Soviet Union in my head) who is sent to investigate the death of a prominent party member alongside a member of what is basically the KGB, who is a blatant sociopath. The story is not so much about him finding out who committed the murder as him trying to adjust to the continual changes in edict about what he is supposed to be reporting, and his gradual erosion of faith in the Republic to whom he has been so zealously linked due to the constant removal of certainty and the bleak worldview of his unsympathetic partner. I have realised that if I make this very heavily about the progression of his state of mind this could easily be a litfic novel rather than a short story or a detective novel as first imagined. Needs more work on all the characters.
Space Pirates
Sci Fi. Story of the bad guys, in this instance a three-person squad within what bills itself as an interjudiciary enforcement agency and is in actual fact rapidly becoming a means of one area of the galactic alliance heavily oppressing the less strong areas without it looking like military action. The squad are, even by the standards of the field agents of this place, pretty unhinged and bad at morals. The stabilising influence is an asexual gambling addict who grew up on an unbearable mineral extraction colony who likes to go to uncontacted worlds and pretend to be a god (Corin); the sole surviving member of a religious colony who were wiped out to make a political point, armed with a garbled understanding of her own faith and a burning desire to revenge herself on the entity that orphaned her (Jade); and a disinherited scion of a piratical ruling elite who can't focus on anything and is mostly trying to get whatever her whims are at the moment while avoiding being murdered by her family, who are also the ones who wiped out the religious fanatic's colony (Jude). One plot revolves around Jade trying to persuade Jude to assassinate her own uncle, one around the three-man squad being sent to destroy a scientist and retrieve their discovery (a weapon which can create little black holes for long enough to destroy anything up to the size of a planet). I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
The Ideal
Several people enter into a parallel conceptual London which exists in a constant state of flux, shaped by the beliefs people have held about London throughout history, all at once. Something something writers are thought to be very valuable but they actually can't do any of the things the residents think they can, and there's a very powerful political/religious leader with a lot of followers coming to the Real London who promulgates the belief that London never was and never will be; something something. It's difficult, I have the plot mapped out somewhere but it is ABSOLUTE COCK.
Vampire Virus
Epistolary epidemic thriller involving a journalism student and a research graduate plus side characters who are pursuing the idea that a new, slow-blossoming epidemic neurovirus may not be a discovery from rural Uzbekistan but is in fact a man-made virus engineered by pharmaceutical megacorporations in order to be able to sell a pre-developed vaccine/cure to as many governments as possible at the highest price, further complications caused by the tendency of viruses to MUTATE. Just needs a firmer plot outline and more joyous research into virology and epidemiology which is blatantly self-serving because I LOVE READING ABOUT DISEASE.
Werewolves
Two books/short stories, depending. Originally it was going to be two halves of one book but I couldn't bring them together sufficiently.
Homo Homini Lupus ("Man is Wolf to Man") - kind of standard queer Gothic if you will. Young art thief from 18th Century Edinburgh and of good social background finds himself on the run in rural Bavaria after becoming a little over-ambitious about selling things he'd nicked. He detours to an isolated castle which he has heard contains a wealth of works of art, and finds himself instead the causal prisoner of a barking-mad Baron whom, it turns out, is also a hereditary lycanthrope. Most of the story focuses on his attempts to get free of this lunatic while being slowly Stockholmed in a fairly bizarre relationship. This is brought to an abrupt end when an unwanted guest of the castle turns out to be a bounty-hunter and thief-taker engaged by the people the Scotsman has ripped off. A fight ensues, during which the Scotsman is accidentally impaled and dies; the baron wolfs out, the bounty hunter is bitten but lucks out on killing the baron, and we're left with a newly werewolfed bounty-hunter. The only thing keeping me from writing this one is a lack of salient knowledge about 18th Century Bavaria and art.
(No title)
Modern day, Southern USA. A young man throws himself on the mercy of a charismatic TV preacher and begs for sanctuary and to be cleansed of his monstrosities. The preacher is intrigued to find that he has a genuine werewolf on his hands and responds by making him into a kind of torture pet for relieving his frustrations with his network and - unbeknowst to the lycanthropy-amnesiac young man - threatening and occasionally killing debtors and opponents. This is unfortunate as the young man in question ran away from his pack leader (our now-immortal bounty-hunter from book 1) because he had discovered he was being used and that the promise of the bounty-hunter to teach him how to control his wolf-outs was a lie and is impossible. Said bounty-hunter is now on the trail of the missing werewolf, leading to a confrontation between the TV preacher and the main wolf and the imprisoning of both preacher and subordinate wolf. I am a) not sure what happens next but I know it has to end with the subordinate wolf finally being free of controlling influences, b) leery of writing about the Southern USA and religious TV even though I find it really interesting and c) worried that the complexities of inheritance vs biting are a bit much for a one-note Id-a-thon. Oh also d) maybe it should have more subplots.
Audio Virus
Short story, Sci-Fi. A virus spread by soundwaves infiltrates the mind of the wetware-modded heroine, who has to struggle to stop it from spreading to higher echelons of society where it might kill people (cyborgs) or completely wipe out the civilisation (nanite clouds hosting the information and infrastructure of their society), while her ability to reason and communicate is degraded by the decay of the neural interface she has relied upon and formed a relationship with all her life.
Big Fantasy/Conlang
Currently just an exercise in fantasy world-building, language playing, and character outlines. I have a cast, the beginnings of a history, some vague unconnected rules of language, and no real desire to turn it into A Big Story yet.
Dark Detectives
That's a hideous name but this is just how I'm remembering it. Series of however many stories I feel like in which a serial killer has been resurrected by a hired necromancer (hired by the parents of one of his victims) in order to atone for his sins. He cannot remain dead again until he has saved or solved the murders of 1000 souls; he can still die, but is unable to remain dead. When he does die, he briefly gains a glimpse of the world as-is and has about an hour of insight after he resurrects. Assisting him is an exiled chaos god from a forgotten African pantheon, whose return to his resurrected pantheon (thanks to an intrepid African-American student of comparative religion and the power of the fannish internet) now has the power to offer him a return to his original powers: he has to redeem the killer. This is hampered by the chaos instincts of the god, and he fact that he can only gain guidance from his fellow gods in the traditional manner - reading the entrails of someone he's killed. This will eventually lead to him reading the other protagonist's entrails. Anyway, the god is called Bob and I'm thinking the murderer is called Carmine and I think this is an excuse to read police procedural guides to writers.
Fool Murders
This is just a sentence in a file reading "series of medieval murders either committed by or solved by a fool/jester type person".
Narcissus Body Horror
Short story: Nigel contracts a disease that makes you clone in your sleep then mate with self. He is stalked by his doppelganger in reflective surfaces, feels compelled to look in them at odd times. The supposed Clone stalking him is actually a real person and he is merely a reflection, which should come up slowly over the course of the story.
A boy who falls in love with a hive
Short story: Another sentence outline.
someone who is cursed to be in love with someone who hates them.
Short story: sentence outline. Kind of like the story of Echo, but more so.
Series of short stories based on cocktails.
Does what it says on the tin. Might try to decide an overriding theme or genre. Perhaps all of them take place in bars.
Year King
Short story? Fantasy. A do-gooder explorer rescues a Year King/sacrificial king from a "primitive" tribe and takes him back to his city, the Year King keeps trying to escape back to his people so he can be sacrificed, and eventually the wrath of the Gods falls upon the city because you don't steal a sacrifice.
Narcissus Ghost Story
Short story: Narcissus is haunted by himself in mirrors and windows and photographs, where his reflection is basically behaving in a sexually aggressive fashion toward him, and Echo is the friend who tries to rescue him.
Intervention
Short story: Female soldier returns from war unable to fit in: joins evangelical church for a sense of belonging but is consumed by the church. Gets her family into illegal debts so that she can donate more to the church, while her family are starving: the mob come after them, and they disavow her. Major problem is that this is totally not a genre I ever write and I find it really difficult. I bet rosethorne could make it work.
Light City
Fantasy book concept vaguely located in Central Asia-ish (modern). The totalitarian attempts to cleanse a city of crime entirely lead to a tactic of spending several generations shoving criminals into the "Shadow City", which is actually a parasite city which feeds on these small sacrifices. Under ordinary circumstances a parasite city may take centuries to take enough wrong-way blunderers to push it to its next stage of development, which is fruiting (releasing spores, or "black dots" the size of people), but with this zealous abuse of the Shadow City (surviving colonies within the Shadow City even produce children who can move easily between worlds) the fruiting comes sooner, and the entire population within the Shadow City riots while the Light City tries to guard the entrances and force them in, the black dots begin pouring out into the main city and dispersing via transport networks across the country. Ending? I have no characters for this and it bothers me.
The Murder Guide
An idea from teenagerhood about a non-fiction book using case studies of real life murderers to teach people about forensics, biology, law, etc, under the guise of a jocular handguide to committing murder and getting away with it, to be worked now into a book in which the narrator also reveals their own complicity in murders by including fictional "unsolved" ones in amongst the real ones, which are revealed as the book progresses to be the narrator bragging about their psychopathic genius.
Spanish flu epidemic WW1 veteran love story thing
Historical queermo love story again. I came up with ages ago, soldier/ambulance-driver/something in hospital with war wounds falls in love with another patient (not a nurse, too similar to The Charioteer) while all around them the flu epidemic rages. Not sure how to put more into this, I want the hospital to end up deserted but I don't know if that actually happened during that time period. Also needs subplots etc.
Red Berries and Clematis
Hotel maid (1930s) has visions of forest Gods and is suspected of murder but is actually being framed by a witchcraft ring; the murder victim is not even dead but pretending to be in order to escape suspicion herself and to make sure that when future crimes are committed as part of a terrible ritual thing, the maid gets the blame. Maid attempts to free herself of suspicion with the assistance of the magical creatures in her visions. I have no idea if this is a good idea it is just a dream I had.
North
Short story. Historical and again very much not my genre: a religious colony of hardcore Christians probably around the 17th Century take themselves off to the Western Isles or somewhere fairly remote and basically starve to death while trying to remain pure in the sight of God. Not sure, this isn't my genre and it's very depressing.
1920s alien-infiltrated pulp murder mysteries, short stories building towards a denouement with a focus on character relations. Vague outline of main plot, no individual cases yet. Need to work out how they relate to each other and to the main arc while still freestanding. Also research on 1920s NYC and alterations based on the presence of known aliens.
Bodyswap
Weird science lesbian rom-com in which suicidal secondary school teacher Stephanie and wanted-by-two-separate-criminal-organisations-and-the-police hapless criminal dogsbody and occasional prostitute Ginger participate in a consciousness swap, which has unexpected side-effects: Stephanie's life becomes chaotic as Ginger seduces one of her Year 13 students and gets her both fired and dumped by her fiance, while Stephanie's complete lack of regard for her own safety and sense of the unreality of it all leads to Ginger becoming feared and obeyed by some of her former enemies. I don't know how to conclude this but I want them to meet and some kind of relationship to ensue.
Mainland
Originally a fanfic thing extrapolating a future for Ralph and Jack from Lord of the Flies, followed by a kind of St Sebastian analogue written for Emily involving one of Samanderic as a spy who has in theory been "killed". The world-building interests me and I like the hapless Mr Saxonbury, but I don't quite know how to finish it, and I will have to un-fanfic it.
Hooked to the Silver Screen
1950s gay BDSM romance mess set in Hollywood during the start of the McCarthyist communist witch hunts with some focus on the connections between Hollywood studios and organised crime. I have the main plotlines but need more of the side ones and need to do a lot more research, which I do at least have the books for. Am perpetually worried about my inability to root it sufficiently not only in the past but in the area, as I fundamentally do not speak American.
Parallelica
Being honest I think this is a dead end. It is mostly a huge cast and some monsters and no idea what to do with them. They can, potentially, be partially salvaged to Light City, or at least the monsters can, but a lot of the cast are very intrinsically of their place, and I don't know how to remove their cultural influences. This is a shame as I really especially like the thrown-together family unit of Diva (non-op trans lady of colour born in prison and with a complicated set of preferences in her life which she keeps complicating further: a stripper and a terrifying badass), Dita (hapless white cis lady with one adopted-out child and one kept one, a revolving door of boyfriends, and a progression from one form of sex work to another), Pooh-Bear (Dita's mixed-race daughter who is five and wants to be a biker princess and is if possible even more madly in love with the idea of having Diva as a second mom than Diva is in love with Dita, who is oblivious), Mikey Bhina (believes he is Dita's adopted out son, and manages to convince her. 14, illiterate, perpetually angry and an arsonist), and Ezekiel Lake (army deserter who had a religious experience in a cave after killing his best friend and now thinks he has a God inside him). I also kind of liked Peaches Bobbit and her gang but I feel like they are so big that they possibly need a book of their own and I don't know that they go with Light City either.
Robots
Medical student signs funding agreement for his degree without reading the small print and finds he has been assigned to an enormously boring interplanetary moss-gathering mission with the kind of useless lunatics who engage in long-distance space travel (in this U faster-than-light travel is impossible, life more complicated than moss has yet to be found on achievable other planets, and most people think anyone who chooses to live off world is a nut and they usually are right). In the course of the voyage he's killed by a malfunctioning toilet, returned to life minus unnecessary personality bits and emotions etc, then gets killed by an exploding fuel tank on landing. He is returned as a nanite cloud and has a crisis of humanity about whether or not he is still the same person, and on return to Earth is declared the property of the corporation who paid for his education and nanite cloud, and put to work in a decidedly less salubrious area than Ship's Doctor. I am of two minds as to whether the corporation want to do in his former room mate and best friend Spikey (loudmouth trans dude who has since become a powerful politician because this is the goddamn future and no one cares if you're cis or trans okay) and whether they are actually right to want to do so or not, which is fundamental to working out whether I'm telling the story of the reluctant hero or the reluctant villain.
Rock Bottom
Prequel to Curious Case of the Firecrotch which I have about 5k on and really can't be bothered with because I was writing it for Liza who has lost interest as well.
Propaganda
Short story, theoretically, about a first-free-generation propaganda-writer in the world's first republic (modelled after the Soviet Union in my head) who is sent to investigate the death of a prominent party member alongside a member of what is basically the KGB, who is a blatant sociopath. The story is not so much about him finding out who committed the murder as him trying to adjust to the continual changes in edict about what he is supposed to be reporting, and his gradual erosion of faith in the Republic to whom he has been so zealously linked due to the constant removal of certainty and the bleak worldview of his unsympathetic partner. I have realised that if I make this very heavily about the progression of his state of mind this could easily be a litfic novel rather than a short story or a detective novel as first imagined. Needs more work on all the characters.
Space Pirates
Sci Fi. Story of the bad guys, in this instance a three-person squad within what bills itself as an interjudiciary enforcement agency and is in actual fact rapidly becoming a means of one area of the galactic alliance heavily oppressing the less strong areas without it looking like military action. The squad are, even by the standards of the field agents of this place, pretty unhinged and bad at morals. The stabilising influence is an asexual gambling addict who grew up on an unbearable mineral extraction colony who likes to go to uncontacted worlds and pretend to be a god (Corin); the sole surviving member of a religious colony who were wiped out to make a political point, armed with a garbled understanding of her own faith and a burning desire to revenge herself on the entity that orphaned her (Jade); and a disinherited scion of a piratical ruling elite who can't focus on anything and is mostly trying to get whatever her whims are at the moment while avoiding being murdered by her family, who are also the ones who wiped out the religious fanatic's colony (Jude). One plot revolves around Jade trying to persuade Jude to assassinate her own uncle, one around the three-man squad being sent to destroy a scientist and retrieve their discovery (a weapon which can create little black holes for long enough to destroy anything up to the size of a planet). I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
The Ideal
Several people enter into a parallel conceptual London which exists in a constant state of flux, shaped by the beliefs people have held about London throughout history, all at once. Something something writers are thought to be very valuable but they actually can't do any of the things the residents think they can, and there's a very powerful political/religious leader with a lot of followers coming to the Real London who promulgates the belief that London never was and never will be; something something. It's difficult, I have the plot mapped out somewhere but it is ABSOLUTE COCK.
Vampire Virus
Epistolary epidemic thriller involving a journalism student and a research graduate plus side characters who are pursuing the idea that a new, slow-blossoming epidemic neurovirus may not be a discovery from rural Uzbekistan but is in fact a man-made virus engineered by pharmaceutical megacorporations in order to be able to sell a pre-developed vaccine/cure to as many governments as possible at the highest price, further complications caused by the tendency of viruses to MUTATE. Just needs a firmer plot outline and more joyous research into virology and epidemiology which is blatantly self-serving because I LOVE READING ABOUT DISEASE.
Werewolves
Two books/short stories, depending. Originally it was going to be two halves of one book but I couldn't bring them together sufficiently.
Homo Homini Lupus ("Man is Wolf to Man") - kind of standard queer Gothic if you will. Young art thief from 18th Century Edinburgh and of good social background finds himself on the run in rural Bavaria after becoming a little over-ambitious about selling things he'd nicked. He detours to an isolated castle which he has heard contains a wealth of works of art, and finds himself instead the causal prisoner of a barking-mad Baron whom, it turns out, is also a hereditary lycanthrope. Most of the story focuses on his attempts to get free of this lunatic while being slowly Stockholmed in a fairly bizarre relationship. This is brought to an abrupt end when an unwanted guest of the castle turns out to be a bounty-hunter and thief-taker engaged by the people the Scotsman has ripped off. A fight ensues, during which the Scotsman is accidentally impaled and dies; the baron wolfs out, the bounty hunter is bitten but lucks out on killing the baron, and we're left with a newly werewolfed bounty-hunter. The only thing keeping me from writing this one is a lack of salient knowledge about 18th Century Bavaria and art.
(No title)
Modern day, Southern USA. A young man throws himself on the mercy of a charismatic TV preacher and begs for sanctuary and to be cleansed of his monstrosities. The preacher is intrigued to find that he has a genuine werewolf on his hands and responds by making him into a kind of torture pet for relieving his frustrations with his network and - unbeknowst to the lycanthropy-amnesiac young man - threatening and occasionally killing debtors and opponents. This is unfortunate as the young man in question ran away from his pack leader (our now-immortal bounty-hunter from book 1) because he had discovered he was being used and that the promise of the bounty-hunter to teach him how to control his wolf-outs was a lie and is impossible. Said bounty-hunter is now on the trail of the missing werewolf, leading to a confrontation between the TV preacher and the main wolf and the imprisoning of both preacher and subordinate wolf. I am a) not sure what happens next but I know it has to end with the subordinate wolf finally being free of controlling influences, b) leery of writing about the Southern USA and religious TV even though I find it really interesting and c) worried that the complexities of inheritance vs biting are a bit much for a one-note Id-a-thon. Oh also d) maybe it should have more subplots.
Audio Virus
Short story, Sci-Fi. A virus spread by soundwaves infiltrates the mind of the wetware-modded heroine, who has to struggle to stop it from spreading to higher echelons of society where it might kill people (cyborgs) or completely wipe out the civilisation (nanite clouds hosting the information and infrastructure of their society), while her ability to reason and communicate is degraded by the decay of the neural interface she has relied upon and formed a relationship with all her life.
Big Fantasy/Conlang
Currently just an exercise in fantasy world-building, language playing, and character outlines. I have a cast, the beginnings of a history, some vague unconnected rules of language, and no real desire to turn it into A Big Story yet.
Dark Detectives
That's a hideous name but this is just how I'm remembering it. Series of however many stories I feel like in which a serial killer has been resurrected by a hired necromancer (hired by the parents of one of his victims) in order to atone for his sins. He cannot remain dead again until he has saved or solved the murders of 1000 souls; he can still die, but is unable to remain dead. When he does die, he briefly gains a glimpse of the world as-is and has about an hour of insight after he resurrects. Assisting him is an exiled chaos god from a forgotten African pantheon, whose return to his resurrected pantheon (thanks to an intrepid African-American student of comparative religion and the power of the fannish internet) now has the power to offer him a return to his original powers: he has to redeem the killer. This is hampered by the chaos instincts of the god, and he fact that he can only gain guidance from his fellow gods in the traditional manner - reading the entrails of someone he's killed. This will eventually lead to him reading the other protagonist's entrails. Anyway, the god is called Bob and I'm thinking the murderer is called Carmine and I think this is an excuse to read police procedural guides to writers.
Fool Murders
This is just a sentence in a file reading "series of medieval murders either committed by or solved by a fool/jester type person".
Narcissus Body Horror
Short story: Nigel contracts a disease that makes you clone in your sleep then mate with self. He is stalked by his doppelganger in reflective surfaces, feels compelled to look in them at odd times. The supposed Clone stalking him is actually a real person and he is merely a reflection, which should come up slowly over the course of the story.
A boy who falls in love with a hive
Short story: Another sentence outline.
someone who is cursed to be in love with someone who hates them.
Short story: sentence outline. Kind of like the story of Echo, but more so.
Series of short stories based on cocktails.
Does what it says on the tin. Might try to decide an overriding theme or genre. Perhaps all of them take place in bars.
Year King
Short story? Fantasy. A do-gooder explorer rescues a Year King/sacrificial king from a "primitive" tribe and takes him back to his city, the Year King keeps trying to escape back to his people so he can be sacrificed, and eventually the wrath of the Gods falls upon the city because you don't steal a sacrifice.
Narcissus Ghost Story
Short story: Narcissus is haunted by himself in mirrors and windows and photographs, where his reflection is basically behaving in a sexually aggressive fashion toward him, and Echo is the friend who tries to rescue him.
Intervention
Short story: Female soldier returns from war unable to fit in: joins evangelical church for a sense of belonging but is consumed by the church. Gets her family into illegal debts so that she can donate more to the church, while her family are starving: the mob come after them, and they disavow her. Major problem is that this is totally not a genre I ever write and I find it really difficult. I bet rosethorne could make it work.
Light City
Fantasy book concept vaguely located in Central Asia-ish (modern). The totalitarian attempts to cleanse a city of crime entirely lead to a tactic of spending several generations shoving criminals into the "Shadow City", which is actually a parasite city which feeds on these small sacrifices. Under ordinary circumstances a parasite city may take centuries to take enough wrong-way blunderers to push it to its next stage of development, which is fruiting (releasing spores, or "black dots" the size of people), but with this zealous abuse of the Shadow City (surviving colonies within the Shadow City even produce children who can move easily between worlds) the fruiting comes sooner, and the entire population within the Shadow City riots while the Light City tries to guard the entrances and force them in, the black dots begin pouring out into the main city and dispersing via transport networks across the country. Ending? I have no characters for this and it bothers me.
The Murder Guide
An idea from teenagerhood about a non-fiction book using case studies of real life murderers to teach people about forensics, biology, law, etc, under the guise of a jocular handguide to committing murder and getting away with it, to be worked now into a book in which the narrator also reveals their own complicity in murders by including fictional "unsolved" ones in amongst the real ones, which are revealed as the book progresses to be the narrator bragging about their psychopathic genius.
Spanish flu epidemic WW1 veteran love story thing
Historical queermo love story again. I came up with ages ago, soldier/ambulance-driver/something in hospital with war wounds falls in love with another patient (not a nurse, too similar to The Charioteer) while all around them the flu epidemic rages. Not sure how to put more into this, I want the hospital to end up deserted but I don't know if that actually happened during that time period. Also needs subplots etc.
Red Berries and Clematis
Hotel maid (1930s) has visions of forest Gods and is suspected of murder but is actually being framed by a witchcraft ring; the murder victim is not even dead but pretending to be in order to escape suspicion herself and to make sure that when future crimes are committed as part of a terrible ritual thing, the maid gets the blame. Maid attempts to free herself of suspicion with the assistance of the magical creatures in her visions. I have no idea if this is a good idea it is just a dream I had.
North
Short story. Historical and again very much not my genre: a religious colony of hardcore Christians probably around the 17th Century take themselves off to the Western Isles or somewhere fairly remote and basically starve to death while trying to remain pure in the sight of God. Not sure, this isn't my genre and it's very depressing.