Hello, I'm new round these parts, and just finding my way around the forums. I also struggle with completing projects I think I have 5 or 6 stories, of varying lengths and scopes. I bounce around between them. Sometimes setting them down for months or years even. Then I'll have a sudden burst of inspiration for a story, that I have sometimes not even thought about for ever, a literal Brain Storm. And I sit down and right 5000 words. Not sure what to call my genre; I always liked the old term "science fantasy", but you don't see that so much anymore. When I think about it there is an apocalyptic thread that runs through several of my stories. Elements of Weird Fiction with a sprinkling of Glam Rock. Have several longer narratives that I am experimenting at crafting in a serialized flash fiction format. I am very verbose. I love words, and perhaps take a painterly approach to writing. So minimalizing is a real challenge for me. But I enjoy the challenge of crafting a scene, or a segment, that feels whole and complete unto itself, it satisfies AND leaves you hungry for the next moment. I am working on one story about a man in a post apocalyptic world who never leaves his car, literally lives in his car. He works as a courier for the technocratic oligarchs responsible for the collapse of civilization. Through a series of flashbacks the story of the Collapse will be told and the Protagonist role in it. Like most post apocalyptic stories its a moral tale, commenting on anti-intellectualism, materialism and the atomization of society, the unsustainability of corporate greed. That sort of thing. Another story imagines Ziggy Stardust was an actual extra terrestrial who visited our planet with a warning about our immanent Collapse if we didn't radically change our way of thinking. He believes he will have the greatest and widest impact if he communicates his message as an androgynous Glam Rock Pop Icon. When he arrives he immediately signs a record contract with a corrupt Music Mogul, who gets the Stranger hooked on drugs, sequesters him in the recording studio, over works him, emotionally manipulates him, until his message becomes confused and muddled in his own mind. I just wrote a series of short chapters where the Music Mogul is taking the Stranger on a tour of the Record Label's Main Headquarters, and shows him the cell-like "offices" where previous pop icons (Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan) are held prisoners, kept 'medicated' and forced to grind out hollow, empty pop hits. Later it will be revealed that the Music Mogul is the Head of just one National Cell of a Great International Espionage Ring that seeks to render the minds of the future generation into malleable mush through the sonic vibrations of Pop Music. The Stranger remembers who he is and his mission to save the world! The Cosmic Dj who has travelled not simply across space and time, but traversed trans-dimensional bridges across the multiverse, is recruited by a secret Anti-terrorist League, exploring the liberating forces (Both politically and spiritually) of sonic vibrations. Throughout the 70s the Starman travels the far reaches of the developing world, with his Stratocaster and Hammond Organ, sitting in with the local "folk" musicians 'turning them on' to rock and roll, funk and soul as the remedy for Fascism and Tyranny. It is implied that the Starman is an avatar of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius. Inspired by Moorcock's work particularly in the 60s, this story will be told in a non-linear, cut-&-paste, collage style. Finally, I just had one of those brainstorms about Dr. Howard Phillips a forensic investigator in early Victorian-era London, hired by a beautiful socialite to track down her missing Uncle. Attempting to write neo-noir in a Lovecraftian world, at a time when the developing sciences undermine faith in organized religion at the same it attempted to validate paranormal and metaphysical beliefs. At a unique historical period in which the mechanisms of Colonialism drove an domestic Facination with the exotic, the occult, and the esoteric. Ultimately Dr Phillips learned that the missing Uncle, himself an Explorer and Collector of rare, and powerful exotica, had learned of a rare orchid that, when smoked, allows the subject to not only contact Oblivion, but to turn and look back upon Existence; hinting at a deep existential closure, a whispered promise of absolute, Divine Perspective. Dr Phillips' investigation will lead him through a labyrinth of gradually darker and increasingly sinister dens of iniquity and corruption, from High Society Ether Parties and exhibitions of ritual scarification and trance-inducing ordeals to opium dens and absinthe dives, to the hashisheen of the Mad Arab, the Gibbering autophagous priests of the Necronomicon, to the mouldering crypts where the pale and ghostly orchid grows only in the brain pan of the recently dead. I look forward to sharing some work with you! Thank you!
Makes me feel very silly and small on a site that is of such high caliber to begin with!
