Voices Noodling
http://trainwreck.zeroesunlimited.com/vi/
If anybody still cares, I stuck the Word docs relevant to Voices From The Inside up on Trainwreck.
I had a couple of interesting story-noodling ideas in my head that I wanted to jot down before I forgot them.
First:
I want to do a love story with a tragic ending in which a dimension-hopping spacetime-traveler appears. She takes on the form of an exotic-looking supercute human girl with an eerie hair/eye color combination (I was thinking green/purple or orange/gray). She'll explain that "her" true form has neither form nor intelligence as we can perceive it and it takes an immense amount of intellectual energy on her part to dumb herself down enough for those she interacts with to understand her. Dale almost instantly falls for her, seeing a sort of kindred spirit (also because this is television and we need to compress our stories as much as possible).
The two are able to communicate at the same level, as Dale feels that he too has to always condescend to everybody around him. Since this extradimensional entity is only appearing human, it's just as likely that she's as condescending to Dale as he is to everybody else.
I imagined her being just awestruck at the sight of The Ship. Naturally it's nowhere near as impressive as the things from her spacetime, but as she explains:
XD:
So this is it, huh? Doesn't look like much from down here. And look at you! It's very interesting being in the presence of the species that will eventually go on to become the dominant race in the universe. The things you'll achieve and accomplish will make thing overhead pale in comparison. It's just junk, a broken toy discarded by an absent-minded child-race. But, every great saga has a first page, and no matter how humble it is, it's always interesting to see where the story starts and follow it to its epic conclusion.
DALE:
Us? Really? Humans spreading out not just to all corners of our galaxy, but out into the universe as well? That's amazing.
XD:
Well, not you as you are now, no. Your present forms and intelligence capacities are by far too rudimentary and frail. A billion of your Earth years will pass before the the descendants of your descendants will spread out to every star in the heavens. It's interesting to see your kind, preserved as a sort of evolutionary larval stage.
TIM:
Did she really just say 'of your Earth years'?
XD:
You as you are now are as far removed from those beings that will one day conquer the universe as you now are from stromatolites.
TIM:
What the hell is a stromatolite?
DALE:
Very primitive life form, quite possibly the O.G. Still around, basically unchanged from their forms of a billion years ago. Have you ever even watched the damn National Geographic Channel?
TIM:
Yeah man, I'm all about that show where people who deserve it sob about how they ended up in foreign jails, I laugh and laugh every time it's on.
Anyhow, Dale falls in love with the XD (or thinks he does) and faces a gutwrenching decision to kill her once their hideout is set upon by the antibody-zombies seeking to purge her as an effect spawned in by The Ship's reality-distorting engines. I want this story to be significant as it not only shows Dale as being more than just the comic relief loose-screw crackpot he starts off as in early episodes, but as a completely broken man, trying his hardest to cope with the tragedy of being stuck on the Inside without anybody to relate to or even love. When he finds this person, he has to destroy her as she's the cause of the seemingly nonstop attacks by the antibody force. This shatters him, having lasting continuity-effects. Part of Dale's backstory is that a girl he liked a lot and dated casually but never had the guts to kiss ended up being shanghaied by The Ship and he took it hard, as us nerds who have girls that never return our phone calls tend.
This is also a narrative point where Dale figures out the nature of the zombies (a thing he puzzles over for the first few episodes) and gets it mostly right. From this point on, the zombies stop being seen as less a threat than as a non-antagonistic force of nature and eventually they mature as full-on allies.
Second:
I was in-and-out of the car all night tonight and missed much of Coast To Coast (honestly, does anybody out there not understand that C2CAM is where I get the germ for many of my ideas?), but what I did catch was the guest speaker discussing how hauntings, Old Hag, alien abductions, night terrors, lucid dreaming/sleep paralysis and bigfoot may all be tied to the same kind of psychological phenomenon but are all interpreted differently by different experiencers and will be every bit as "real" to them as it is to another experiencer who perceives what he experienced in a completely different manner.
This got me thinking about haunted house stories. I thought it'd be an interesting twist if the house itself were the ghost or alien or succubus or night terror and it is perceived differently by the characters as they explore it. Rooms are constantly shifting, the house's style changes from observer to observer, the layout has no consistency as does its physical location within the city.
Just kind of stream-of-consciousness making this up as I type, I imagine the story starting off with Our Heroes trying to ditch a Cultist police patrol and winding up in a house that one of them swears to God was a vacant lot last week.
From there, Alison tries to explain the above thesis and everybody else tries to puzzle out the nature of the house, battling with their own internal demons which manifest themselves within the house.
I can't tell yet if this take on the haunted house story is fun and original or stodgy and cliched.
If anybody still cares, I stuck the Word docs relevant to Voices From The Inside up on Trainwreck.
I had a couple of interesting story-noodling ideas in my head that I wanted to jot down before I forgot them.
First:
I want to do a love story with a tragic ending in which a dimension-hopping spacetime-traveler appears. She takes on the form of an exotic-looking supercute human girl with an eerie hair/eye color combination (I was thinking green/purple or orange/gray). She'll explain that "her" true form has neither form nor intelligence as we can perceive it and it takes an immense amount of intellectual energy on her part to dumb herself down enough for those she interacts with to understand her. Dale almost instantly falls for her, seeing a sort of kindred spirit (also because this is television and we need to compress our stories as much as possible).
The two are able to communicate at the same level, as Dale feels that he too has to always condescend to everybody around him. Since this extradimensional entity is only appearing human, it's just as likely that she's as condescending to Dale as he is to everybody else.
I imagined her being just awestruck at the sight of The Ship. Naturally it's nowhere near as impressive as the things from her spacetime, but as she explains:
XD:
So this is it, huh? Doesn't look like much from down here. And look at you! It's very interesting being in the presence of the species that will eventually go on to become the dominant race in the universe. The things you'll achieve and accomplish will make thing overhead pale in comparison. It's just junk, a broken toy discarded by an absent-minded child-race. But, every great saga has a first page, and no matter how humble it is, it's always interesting to see where the story starts and follow it to its epic conclusion.
DALE:
Us? Really? Humans spreading out not just to all corners of our galaxy, but out into the universe as well? That's amazing.
XD:
Well, not you as you are now, no. Your present forms and intelligence capacities are by far too rudimentary and frail. A billion of your Earth years will pass before the the descendants of your descendants will spread out to every star in the heavens. It's interesting to see your kind, preserved as a sort of evolutionary larval stage.
TIM:
Did she really just say 'of your Earth years'?
XD:
You as you are now are as far removed from those beings that will one day conquer the universe as you now are from stromatolites.
TIM:
What the hell is a stromatolite?
DALE:
Very primitive life form, quite possibly the O.G. Still around, basically unchanged from their forms of a billion years ago. Have you ever even watched the damn National Geographic Channel?
TIM:
Yeah man, I'm all about that show where people who deserve it sob about how they ended up in foreign jails, I laugh and laugh every time it's on.
Anyhow, Dale falls in love with the XD (or thinks he does) and faces a gutwrenching decision to kill her once their hideout is set upon by the antibody-zombies seeking to purge her as an effect spawned in by The Ship's reality-distorting engines. I want this story to be significant as it not only shows Dale as being more than just the comic relief loose-screw crackpot he starts off as in early episodes, but as a completely broken man, trying his hardest to cope with the tragedy of being stuck on the Inside without anybody to relate to or even love. When he finds this person, he has to destroy her as she's the cause of the seemingly nonstop attacks by the antibody force. This shatters him, having lasting continuity-effects. Part of Dale's backstory is that a girl he liked a lot and dated casually but never had the guts to kiss ended up being shanghaied by The Ship and he took it hard, as us nerds who have girls that never return our phone calls tend.
This is also a narrative point where Dale figures out the nature of the zombies (a thing he puzzles over for the first few episodes) and gets it mostly right. From this point on, the zombies stop being seen as less a threat than as a non-antagonistic force of nature and eventually they mature as full-on allies.
Second:
I was in-and-out of the car all night tonight and missed much of Coast To Coast (honestly, does anybody out there not understand that C2CAM is where I get the germ for many of my ideas?), but what I did catch was the guest speaker discussing how hauntings, Old Hag, alien abductions, night terrors, lucid dreaming/sleep paralysis and bigfoot may all be tied to the same kind of psychological phenomenon but are all interpreted differently by different experiencers and will be every bit as "real" to them as it is to another experiencer who perceives what he experienced in a completely different manner.
This got me thinking about haunted house stories. I thought it'd be an interesting twist if the house itself were the ghost or alien or succubus or night terror and it is perceived differently by the characters as they explore it. Rooms are constantly shifting, the house's style changes from observer to observer, the layout has no consistency as does its physical location within the city.
Just kind of stream-of-consciousness making this up as I type, I imagine the story starting off with Our Heroes trying to ditch a Cultist police patrol and winding up in a house that one of them swears to God was a vacant lot last week.
From there, Alison tries to explain the above thesis and everybody else tries to puzzle out the nature of the house, battling with their own internal demons which manifest themselves within the house.
I can't tell yet if this take on the haunted house story is fun and original or stodgy and cliched.