I’ve mentioned this before on my blog, but I keep a list of ideas for novels/comic books/films/TV shows/etc. on my flash drive. And over the past semester, that list grew pretty damn lengthy. In fact, I had more ideas than I did in any other semester. And tonight, I got my one-hundredth idea for the list! And having just typed that, I wonder how I will ever find the time to write all of those stories. I probably won’t, but it’ll be fun to try.
Anyway, the idea for number one-hundred came to me quite by accident (apparently that’s how all the best ideas come). I’ve previously announced that before I get back to working on Laura Horn, I wanted to do some short stories. And before I decided to do those short stories, I decided to take one last look at one short story, maybe see if I could spruce it up a little and possibly publish it on WattPad (I’ve published one or two things on there since I got an account on that website. More on that to follow in a future post). The story in question, Resurrection, is about a man who is brought back to life through advances in science, but something goes terribly wrong and his resurrection isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That story has gone through several different drafts and incarnations, and I thought I’d give the latest incarnation a look over to see if I could make it better. When I looked over it though, something occurred to me midway through the short story. There’s this one scene when my main character encounters a religious leader who is more than a little upset about this resurrection. I was going to have my protagonist call him an old fart, but with the years he’s been dead, the protagonist is over ninety years old. He should be calling the preacher a stupid kid.
And that’s when it hit me. A short story was too short to tell this story. It had to be expanded, to go into a novella or even a full novel! Resurrection had to be resurrected in a new form.
God, that was a bad play on words.
But that’s beside the point. Here is the point: the last time I trotted out Resurrection and sent it to a friend, he told me that it was an interesting concept and that it could be expanded into a novel or into a film. Oh, that sounded nice. The thing is, I couldn’t figure out how to expand it into a novel, and I didn’t have the time to write a screenplay. And even if I did have the time, I wouldn’t know how to go about getting a screenplay sold (though I might try in the future, when I have the time). But at that single thought on how the main character should think about the preacher, I had an idea on how to expand the story into a novel. I stopped looking through the short story, went to my Ideas list, and recorded Idea #100.
My idea is alive! ALIVE!
I don’t know when I’ll be able to write the novel version of Resurrection, mostly because I have a few other projects that take priorities that take place before it. However, I’m sure it won’t be too long before I get around to it. I like the idea, and I don’t want to be working on this story on and off for several years. I don’t want to do that at all. I really want to write this story eventually and do it sooner rather than later. For now though working on it just won’t be possible, so instead I’ll just leave a few hints as to what we can expect from this future novel:
–some of the themes will include aging, adjusting to a changed and changing world, and death and dying.
–the technology aspect will make Reborn City jealous (then again, the point of RC was never the technology, but whatever).
–the resurrection, though scientific in nature, won’t be plagued by problems of the scientific realm.
–and finally, I may release each finished chapter of this novel, once the book has been heavily edited, on WattPad or on my blog. One of them.
I also hope someday to get to many of the ideas I’ve written on that list. A lot of them I feel are really great ideas, and I would love to write and share them with the world. So the hope is that I can get a good number of them written over the coming years, and that as each novel (or in the future, if God is willing, each film or manga or TV series) is released, there will be someone willing to check it out and read it, maybe even a lot of someones. I think that’s why I keep writing, even if I haven’t exactly been super-successful yet. It’s because I know that each story could potentially make someone happy, and I’m still writing fot hose people. Hopefully we’ll find each other someday and they’ll enjoy what I’ve written for them.
That’s all for now. I’m going to take a break and then get started on an original short story. I’ve got close to seventy ideas for short stories as well, so I need to get some of them out of the way. Good night, Followers of Fear.
Rami Ungar The Writer 