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: The (Your Hometown Here) Slasher

We had some nice rain yesterday; at least, in my neighborhood we did. And the fires are finally thinning rather than just shifting their locations. Soon, I will find something new to obsess about. Yay!

Meantime, after all that generalization last week that went on and on and on, I thought I'd do something short and specific today. Also, I'm not much in the mood today and I need to wake Damon up to play the Sunday puzzle soon. So I do what all experienced authors do when they need an idea in a hurry - I opened up some old files.

Seriously, I have a subfolder in my Story folder labeled "Dormant." Stuff I haven't worked on in forever and am pretty sure I can't make saleable, but am not ready to discard, because hey, the idea was sound; I just didn't execute it well enough. And hey, I still have a word processing file for "The San Antonio Slasher." Good lord, there's a blast from the past. Draft 1 was almost certainly typed on my old electric machine.

It was the story of a Day in the Life of a wannabe serial killer and his victim. Jim Seagram is a young man whose ambition is to be a serial killer, a mysterious figure who strikes terror into the hearts of all and whose identity becomes a popular intellectual game. His heroes are Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. And his victim of choice is little old ladies. It's the day he's planned for his debut, and the story alternates between him - going to his job at a small neighborhood garage, interacting with his co-workers, planning the evening's work - and his designated victim, Persis Morgenroth, going about her little old lady business. Her daughter is a worrywart and keeps calling her, wants her to get a guard dog or something, but Persis has lived in this house for over fifty years and is on good terms with all her neighbors (though that mechanic is beginning to annoy her, the way he glares at her). She gossips with her garden club, makes a carrot cake, runs her errands, goes jogging, and feels secure. Nothing bad can possibly happen to her in the house she came to as a bride, where she raised all her children, where she can still feel her family's love all around her.

Even when Jim breaks in, Persis remains calm; which is more than can be said of him. The reason he wants to kill little old ladies is that he resents the power they exert over him - he was raised by his grandmother, who treated all men as incompetent boys - and he thinks his big knife will reverse that. But Persis recognizes him despite his carefully worked out disguise and she just can't feel anything but annoyance at that rude young man from the garage.

It doesn't end well for Jim.

I realized, writing all this out, that I've gone back to the core idea - the story alternating between the serial killer who kills, or tries to, out of his sense of inferiority and his innocent prospective victim, who really is superior to him - for the often-rejected novel to which I sometimes refer as "The Happy Family Serial Killer Story." I don't seem to have quite made it work there, either.

But if somebody could, I'm positive there's an awesome story to be made of it.

Dreaming at the Idea Garage Sale

Apparently, I had an idea in my sleep last night. I had a character, a college student, who budded off different personalities on a semivoluntary basis, kind of like role-playing characters, except they manifested physically; kind of like split personalities, except they acted simultaneously and didn't have to share a body. At one point, a clinically depressed persona contemplated uninventing herself.

So, dream inspiration, right? Mary Shelley took her Frankenstein nightmare, which barely had a concept in it, and made a classic, so I could do something with this, too. Well, maybe. Except the dream itself made me feel so bad I woke up in the middle of the night, depressed. It was like being trapped in a room with the TV blaring repeat episodes of a tedious show about unpleasant people. I can see, intellectually, that the concept has some potential, but I disliked the dream so much I don't want to think about it enough to realize that potential. Maybe, when the aftereffects have worn off, I'll do that. More likely, I'll forget all about it. After all, it has no potential for use in the current book project, which is a realistic historical novel, and I need to focus on that.

That's the way it is with dreams. We all have them, all night long, and sometimes we make brilliant connections, but almost all the time we lose the connection, and sometimes even the imagery, shortly after waking up. That probably means we don't need to access this stuff with our conscious mind. The conscious mind is not the be-all and end-all of our existence, and the subconscious has needs, too. Many people maintain that the conscious and subconscious can be trained to work together through the use of dream diaries and so on. Maybe so. It's never worked for me, but a lot of things don't work for me that work for other people. Like, coffee. Steak. High-heeled shoes.

So what are your great dream ideas; and can you do anything with them?