Idea Garage Sale: Vampire Beach Baby

She was six years old when some stupid grown-up made her a vampire.

All she wanted to do was go to the beach with her best friend!

I hate vampires, and I hate the whole "evil child" trope. Possibly that's where this dream came from.

Idea Garage Sale: Trickster vs. Dark Lord

So, you've got an Evil Overlord, and the problem is, how to bring down the guy with all the power. You can destroy his power base and throw the ring into the volcano, you can fight a guerrilla revolution that carries within it the seeds of its own corruption (Yeah, saw Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday; the last book is easily the most disturbing and if you're in it for the happy ending, I can tell you, you need to bail now), you can go toe-to-toe in the field, your armies vs. his armies and way too many innocent people get hurt.

Or you can trick him into destroying himself.

The trick was lost to me when I woke up; and, being a dream-trick, probably wouldn't work in the real world or any plausible fictional one I could cook up. But I remember the Trickster. She had no political acumen or abstract sense of right or wrong. She had no physical power and no network of friends. She didn't even have a long-term plan. She was a street kid adept at talking her way out of trouble and accustomed to living from moment to moment. But the habit of jumping to the next stepping stone without looking to see whether there's another beyond it lands her in more and more complicated situations.

She has learned that, when she's at someone's mercy, the most effective strategy is to figure out what that someone wants, and convince them that the way to get it is to show mercy. She brokers information, and when she doesn't have any she makes it up. No one's going to take the unsupported word of a street kid, so she's also learned to seize on something, anything, concrete within reach and turn it into evidence of her truth. With any luck, she'll be able to escape before everything unravels.

But once in the Dark Lord's sanctum, she can't escape. All her ways are blocked. And she's not the only desperate liar in the citadel. Everyone from the lowly guard who first catches her all the way up to the Dark Lord himself wants a small handful of things: Security, Promotion, Power; which all boil down to the same thing in the toxic atmosphere of a reign of terror. They all, in their eagerness for more control, give her a convenient handle to control them; but if they ever suspect that she's anything but a scared tool of their ambitions, that's the end for her. Her basic claim is to know where Something is. They're the ones who project their own knowledge of the Something that can make or break the Dark Lord's power onto the vague flim-flam she starts with; and the faster she tapdances to reflect their desires, the closer to the top she gets. Until she has to deliver to the Dark Lord himself.

She doesn't want to be his downfall. She just wants to get away. And when she does become his downfall, and is shoved into his place at the top of the festering heap - she manages, at last, to slip away, leaving the Good Guys to sweep in to a squabbling, disoriented citadel and mop up.

This was a dream, and the few details of this broad outline are hopelessly impractical. A key feature of the con, for instance, was the cherry-red 50s Cadillac convertible she drove through the volcano. (Wrecked the shocks.)

As blockbuster fantasy series go, the premise has real possibilities. It'd have to be fast-paced, clever, disorienting, and very, very plotty. I.E., well outside my talent range, alas.

The premise would also work for a realistic stand-alone novel, if it were scaled down; if the Evil Overlord was the boss who runs a single town or corporation, for example. Still not really the kind of thing I can see myself writing.

I'd read it, though. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Idea Garage Sale: Running Down the Hill

Worst Nightmare Ever.

Excuse me if I've done this before. It's hard to believe I haven't, but searching relevant tags, I can't find it.

I had this dream when I was in first grade. Maybe younger, but I think it was first grade.

My little sister and I are being pursued by a Monster. Nothing wildly original about this Monster - it's just the Frankenstein variety, and it's slow, but it's tireless. We're not. My sister is so small and I'm running so fast down the hill in the unfamiliar suburban neighborhood that she flies out behind me like a ragdoll as I'm holding her hand, running, and we're both screaming at the top of our lungs, no words just screaming, the most penetrating continuous little kid screams we can muster as we run down the hill, in the dusk, down the middle of a quiet street faced by two rows of neat quiet houses with lights in the windows.

And as we run past screaming and the Monster lumbers after us, at each house, the curtains are drawn and the lights go out.

That's where I woke up. But that's where the story starts, isn't it?

Because no one will help these children and they are too small, the Monster is too big, slow as it is they will be too tired to run anymore, the little sister and big sister will lose their grips and the little sister will fall on the asphalt, get all scraped up, and the screams will change and the people inside those ordinary neat quiet houses will hear the change, and remain safe in their quiet neat dark houses, dark as their hearts that did nothing -

And there will be consequences, and the story is about the consequences.

And I am afraid to write it because when I was little I was running down that hill. But to be a grownup is to be the person turning the lights off.

And anyway I can't really write horror. I'm not ruthless enough.

Idea Garage Sale: The Buried House

Apparently, a man who inherited a single-story house in Turkey started cleaning it out, and discovered it had five stories, four of them buried, at least some of which date back a couple thousand years.

I've had that dream! Usually it's a house I've lived in, but sometimes it's one I just moved to, or one not resembling the house I live in currently but which I've been living in for awhile in the dream. And then you're cleaning, and you find an unfamiliar door, which leads to a room with more doors; stairs and halls; all kinds of space you could be using and haven't been, full of resources you didn't know about.

And bathrooms. For some reason, lots and lots and lots of extra bathrooms...that's probably not true of the house in Anatolia, though.

The thematic uses of a house which gets bigger the more you clean and explore in it are obvious (I've always assumed that houses are metaphorical of minds in the dreams), but - what can you do with it, as a plot?

Can you go back and forth in time using the hidden layers of house?

Is there Something down there which was deliberately buried? And is it a Dread Secret that should stay buried, a Fabulous Treasure that should be brought to light, or a Can of Worms that one might sensibly hesitate to open?

What if the world above the Buried House is hostile, and the Buried House can provide a refuge, an Underground Railroad safe house or a semi-permanent hiding place, a Secret Annexe?

What if the homeowner allows the archeologists to move in, but insists on continuing to live in the top house layers, family and all, with academics coming and going, relationships forming, and screening stations all over the backyard? There's a live-action farce there, I think.

What if someone is already using that space? For nefarious purposes? Or simply to live?

What if the buried space is the interface between two versions of the same world?

What if the people already living down there are you and your family - only different?

Idea Garage Sale: Talking Animals of the Apocalypse

No way I'll ever use this one, but I bet somebody could do it right.

This was a story-dream. The post-apocalyptic dystopia was going on, and one of the features was, that anthropomorphic animals societies were A Thing. The totalitarian rulers were all what the dream was calling cis-humans (I know I'm appropriating the term cis here, way out of original context of contrasting the cisgender from the transgender, but it works pretty well to express the idea of "what society treats as the norm"!) while the oppressed classes were both the cis-human poor and modified animals much like the Talking Animals in Narnia - larger than their non-talking counterparts, with humanlike intelligence that didn't interfere with the specializations of their animals from which they derived. I specifically remember wild foxes and domestic goats. The "wild" talking animals lived separate from humans and the "domestic" talking animals were integrated as equals into the poor human communities, who regarded them as human equivalents; but the ruling classes regarded both kinds of talking animals as animals. So that at one point, for instance, one of them shot and skinned an intelligent fox because she wanted to wear the fur. At another point, the protagonists were saved from patrolling oppressors because the goats fooled them into overlooking the humans they were looking for - the goats were not considered seriously as intelligent agents.

So the oppressed are all working together, right? Not quite. It turned out that the Resistance had a number of different factions, all made up of cis-humans and intelligent animals (hmm, does tranimals work as a term here?) working independently and with little knowledge of each other. Something was preventing them from communicating and coordinating. Not from cooperating - the main thrust of the dream involved following the attempts of two parties who crossed paths in the field and jeopardized each other's missions to clean up the resultant mess, carry out both missions, and keep everyone safe from the oppressors who were suddenly swarming everywhere.

And there was some sort of boarding school that was becoming the locus of resistance because it was one of the few places that people from different communities could meet face to face? But the boarding school taught only cis-humans and was run by the oppressing class. (Think, Indian boarding schools of 20th century America, where Indian children were taken to be brainwashed out of their culture.)

I will never use this, because I don't even like dystopian fiction as a rule. Real life is as dystopian as I care to get and a little more, thank you! But if you came up with a premise that made the tranimals work, the whole story would work, and would fall into place.

BTW, the cis-humans? Should all be brown. Because in the future, we will all be brown.

Idea Garage Sale: Spies?

So in the middle of the week I had a dream with a plot. Not the illusion of a plot, which is common in dreams. You wake up thinking you have a whole novel, but on reflection, when you try to lay it out for yourself, it's full of gaps and logic lapses and transitions that don't work, so all you're left with is a handful of images that haunt you, or don't. (That bit with the frog, the river, the library, and the pageboy, from college - it's still there and I still can't do anything with it.) But this one kept its shape when I reviewed it, consistent characters and situations and the whole nine yards.

This was probably, however, because it was a cliche. Its beats were set in a familiar rhythm; the shape of the story matched up exactly to thousands of short stories in hundreds of anthologies. Yes, the details were distinctive, as far as they went, but I knew I would never write it because the most it would ever be would be a well-crafted, workmanlike piece and though that's worth doing as a small part of an overarching career that requires steady output, I wouldn't enjoy writing it and I couldn't sell it in this market, not without putting a lot more charisma into it than I ever have. I don't suck but I don't dazzle and I don't have the energy necessary to sell a pedestrian short story. But I figured I'd use it for the garage sale, as that's part of what the garage sale is for.

But now I can't remember it. At all.

It was a mystery, but not a murder mystery and I don't think a theft. Maybe a spy story? Does anybody write spy short stories? (You know, I don't think they do. I don't think that's a genre at all. I wonder why not.) It was suspense of some kind, anyway. Was there a ghost? I don't think there was a ghost...

And the moral of that story is, write stuff down even when it's simple and clear and plain and cliched and you know you'll remember it.

Maybe it wasn't even suspense. Maybe I'm influenced by the misreading I also did during the week, when I was skimming movie descriptions and saw one in which the character finds work as an assassin in a department store and has an affair with her manager, which made me sit up and take notice. But of course it was "assistant," which is boring. An assassin in a department store is absurd, but at least it isn't boring. Maybe trained assassins are the next level of escalation in corporate espionage.

So the garage sale idea for today would be a short story about an assassin/spy in a department store, playing a high-stakes game among the escalators, between Lingerie and Housewares. There's a ringer in the Catalog Department, and the proof sheets in the photo studio's secret file drawer are too dangerous to see the light of day...

Idea Garage Sale: Half-sibling Hurricane

So I had one of those dreams, the ones that are clearly a story and they all hang together and you can work this but by the time you get to the notebook all the connections have fallen apart. The notes look like this:

Hurricane. Connections. half-siblings, but how was this figured out? He rescues his half-brother and sends him off to their mutually unknown father but how is this discovered? Purple woven-plastic strap - held a pager - protagonist scavenges it off of the street after his brother loses it - connection not made till later - only one it could have been in that area, the purple indicates a hotel in another part of town. Protag is frustrated, angry, keeps rescuing people but doesn't know how big a difference he's making - because it's all incidental to something else he's trying to do, and failing. In the dream, everyone was male but the woman who lost her dog. Even the dog was male. Why?

I'm tolerably good at remembering my dreams, compared to most people, but as you see, that's still not very good. And it leaves out the storekeeper running after the dog yelling "Cumin!"

The trouble, of course, is that these dreams don't make as much sense when you have them as they seem to at the time. Your brain isn't working the same way it does when awake, so connections are made differently and sense doesn't mean the same thing. It is as much a myth that you can take your dreams and transfer them directly to stories as it is that you can do so with your real life. Both require a lot of organizational work before they can be useful.

Even, I suspect, if the plan is to be deliberately surrealistic and dreamlike.

The purple pager strap is the most vivid image from the dream, so I could start organizing with it; but that quickly grows frustrating as it's not in itself an evocative thing and I am immediately bogged down in logistics, maps, timing, and such issues before I have any idea of the important parts of the story: i.e. What the protagonist was trying to do when he incidentally rescued people; and What is the deal with the half-siblings and the unknown father? Because though only the protagonist and one half-brother are indicated in those notes, in the dream there were definitely six.

That six is almost certainly derived from the Sims2 Tricou bastards, so I would have no solid reason to retain that specific number if I went with this as a story; but the sense of this poor desperately solitary boy, able to help everyone but himself although he has a family he's already interacting with is the emotional core of the dream, so he's certainly got more than the one half-sibling. And it's not like that's a story that wraps up with a happy reunion, either. No matter how much a kid with an unknown father wants to meet him, the reality of doing so has to be full of resentment by the nature of things.

So who is this kid?

Why is he so good at rescuing people from hurricanes?

What/who is it he's so desperately searching for? There must be some stable, loved figure in his life, someone he depends on or who is dependent on him. Someone who is now in jeopardy, or at least lost in a situation in which jeopardy is imminent. Someone who can get the credit for the kid's being so much more responsible than his father was that his actions allow something coherent to rise from the chaos of the storm.

Figure that out, everything else follows, and you've got yourself a story.

Don't figure it out, and all you've got is another mess of a dream.

Idea Garage Sale: City on the Brink

Sometimes the dreams that present as more or less coherent stories retain their shape when you awake.

A city, middle of nowhere, closed to outsiders; but the outsiders in question had a choice between the city and death in the wilderness, so they found a way in. The city had good reason to close itself off. A minority of the population was born with an inability to digest normal food, but had to absorb nutriment through the skin from a bright green ointment derived from a rare local plant. If they couldn't get this, they would go into rapid decline and die - unless they drank human blood. But then they were full vampires, who reproduced by drinking from the same person multiple times.

The plant, apparently, could not be cultivated.

You see the problem.

I had found some of the plant and made what I thought was a considerable quantity of the ointment, so I took it to the nursery where a human woman was trying to save a baby. I took the child and started applying my ointment. At first she turned from sickly yellow to bright healthy green; but the effect faded with startling rapidity. She'd gotten too close to starving. I used up all the ointment and was scraping residue off my skin, trying frantically to save her, but the nurse told me it was too late. If one of us didn't feed her blood, she'd die. I resisted this, explaining the logic of the situation to her - as if she weren't all-too-keenly aware of it already! Yes, she agreed, if we fed her blood we'd make the overall problem worse; but if we didn't, we would watch her die right here, right now, and know we could have saved her.

So I woke up; an option that should be more widely available when we are faced with insoluble problems.

The basic premise here is of course absurd - how on earth would a condition like that arise in the normal course of events? A curse, perhaps. The outsiders who got in could see that the population had gotten so resigned to their untenable situation that they weren't even trying to fix it - using up every bit of the plant as soon as they found it, without leaving anything to reseed, but not even looking for the only long-term solution, a cure for the condition. Even though they knew that the vampires were going to run out of things to eat in the near future, as more and more people turned.

Not my kind of story (I hate vampires), so - why did I dream it?

Idea Garage Sale: Serial Dreaming

It's official: I can't stop doing this! I have no desire whatsoever to have new story ideas at this time. I want to get on with the lesbian western, finish the research and get into that comfortable chapter-a-day groove of creation. And I still have plenty of old ideas to put up at the garage sale. Last night before going to bed I briefly considered which one I should blog about today; and what do I do? Dream a trilogy!

It could be three books, three movies, three graphic novels, or a three-season television show with a high rate of character turnover. I'm not sure how it broke itself down into three distinct parts (I don't think I woke up in between them) or how it relates to the other dream content I recall, and the details have blurred under the onrush of necessary Sunday chores, but the rough outline is clear enough.

Part 1: A woman with supernatural powers is pursued by a group with similar powers. She fears them, is hostile to them; but she also fears her powers and what she might do to people with them. I don't think she was a vampire, but an authoritative middle-aged Suit in the pursuing group was; he had none of the sadomasochistic sex appeal of the modern literary vampire. (Hmmm...neither did the last vampire I dreamed and blogged about. This guy wasn't played by Patrick Stewart, though - he had hair.) When, after numerous action-packed adventures in which she manages to keep her moral compass, she is finally taken, she learns that she had gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick about her pursuers. They are an agency whose job is to locate, evaluate, and recruit or restrain people with oddball powers. They have access to trainers, researchers, therapists, and other helpful resources. Since she has chosen the moral high ground time after time, she is offered an education and a job.

Part 2: After some lapse of time, the protagonist of Part 1 is leading her own team to contain an active threat, someone who has gone rogue from the agency. It wasn't clear to me why a more experienced leader didn't have this job, and the middle-aged vampire who became her mentor does not appear. You can always think of a good excuse for this kind of thing, though. She has to step into a leadership role, form a coherent team, outsmart someone who knows all the procedures and powers to be brought against him, and fight the bureaucracy on the side.

Part 3: The protagonist of the last two episodes and the middle-aged vampire are missing, teams are reshuffled, and strange orders are coming down from on high. The second-in-command from Part 2 (who resembles me; I was less of a spectator and more of a POV character in this part of the dream than in the first two) is not supposed to look for her, but of course does so anyway. Lethal force is authorized more than it used to be, team leaders are given much less autonomy in the field, narcs are planted in the teams, and supernatural people who in the past would have been recruited or considered so inconsequential as to require only casual monitoring are being confined. Solving the mystery of the disappearances also reveals a shift in the policies of the agency. It's warping from an agency that serves and protects to one that controls. The vampire leads some of the characters in going underground, while the protagonist determines to work within the organization to turn it away from the disastrous path it's on.

Obviously, this was setting up Part 4, but I woke up. The concept doesn't suck, but my husband reads this sort of thing a lot more than I do, and all the characters were adults. Besides which, I've already got a book to work on. Maybe it'll simmer and turn into something, but I doubt it. Certainly, I could have dozens of dreams containing story concepts as good or better by the time I felt able to focus on it.

All you have to do is prime the pump a bit. Once you have the habit, you have it, and can't turn it off.