Urban fantasy ideas
Sep. 27th, 2011 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday am listening to Covenant and VNV Nation on YouTube. I really need to buy some decent versions, the sound quality is bad even by my standards. BUT. This is the soundtrack of my urban fantasy 'verses. I don't know why. I listen to this and suddenly Norwich is full of ghosts and wolves and vampires. Mostly ghosts. Having grand martial arts fights on church rooftops. I don't know which church would have room for that, but there's a ton of churches in Norwich, I'm sure we could find one. Also one to be the goth club for the night. Maybe the arts place?
The thing with urban fantasy is it works best when it starts with the specific urban. It's applying poetry logic to a landscape, making symbols out of street signs. Sure, you can have vampires anywhere, but if it's just a blurry anywhere then it remains nowhere. If it's a specific corner of a specific street you can start making it work.
The vampire idea I have fully worked out I haven't written because it's horror based around domestic violence and I don't want to go there long enough to write it all down. I know which streets it happens on. Which classrooms. Not so much which houses, because I don't know if they're as swish on the inside as they look from outside or if they're converted into student housing, but I have the house clear in my head. Train station, riverside, cinema, bridge to the waterfront, dark twisty construction places, trying to run back to the light.
I know the thing with the wolves happens on Union street with a view of the park. Which is probably a bit unfair on Union Street since the newspapers were only reporting on the drugs den getting closed. But I can mix it with the place that got closed near me and end up with a story about really big dogs and people who choose to act like them.
The ghosts ideas are the richest. I had a whole set of story ideas worked out for Giles/Ethan fanfic that I think can work better if I flip them to being new characters. Today in my head they are Rachel and Helaine. Rachel works at City College teaching Shakespeare. ... but then I realise I've just swapped her in instead of my tutor and the incongruity in the different visuals kind of stalls my brain. But, Shakespeare it must be, because one unit is Hamlet and Dr Faustus, and the other is rewrites of Romeo and Juliet, and I can work with that in this ghosts and romance setting. Some ghost turns up and tries to get you to do things? Promises you can do magic if you just work with them? Renaissance unit, after the sonnets, half way through the semester when the year is drawing in. Things go all starcrossed? Well we know who they're not, but, culture does tend to go there. I'd have to invent units elsewise, which is much less efficient. I know TV always goes with Shakespeare when it's trying to make pretentious intertextual references but so it goes.
The big circle outside the bus station is clearly a transport circle. But only if it's not blocked. And you don't want randoms walking into the circle while you're trying to transport, so most of the day it's going to be too busy to work. I'm trying to figure if it only works while the bus station is open, or if it gets busy in the small hours.
The main thing about the ghosts 'verse is the contrast in martial arts styles built in. The humans are stuck doing things that are physically possible and when they get hit they get hurt. The spirits? Gravity optional is just the start. They're not trying to beat the physical stuffing out of another spirit, they're trying to break their will, their self belief. They're trying to prove that one of them is better and the other one has lost. That's an active incentive to do the fanciest stuff possible. And they can crowd surf, ride the will of the crowd for power. So they're playing to an audience, sometimes. If the audience doesn't believe in them, that backfires badly. Ghosts, when seen, can be made into shadows, by the force of disbelief. To survive at all a ghost needs one living person to believe in them enough to anchor them on this side. Otherwise they might have the strength of will to keep themselves together, but they can't get in. So, sometimes they'll show off for just that one person, and draw power from their belief. But if they can get a whole crowd to believe, the amount of power available is much much bigger... and much less likely to drain someone unconscious. Since crowds are much more likely to believe glowy see through figures are projected TV images than to properly believe, this is a difficult trick to work. Getting beat up and falling might actually help, since they're obeying the usual rules. Mostly though the scene I have in mind is somewhere that knows the dead person anyway and wouldn't be much surprised to see them do *anything*. Building up a rep in advance is helpful.
So I'm looking for plots that lead up to grand martial arts fights. Involving an English teacher. In Norwich.
... you can see the slight problem.
The main bad guys are the ones patrolling the borders. Like, the forces of chaos say, why not have ghosts hang out in the living world? So they exhaust the live people! So what? Is no fun being dead! We hang here! ... lots of alive people and actually quite a few dead ones think actually the dead should move on and leave the alive places for the alive people. So the forces of order say oy, time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
And then there's the next worlds. Is no useful if there's just heaven and hell and it's simple. People believe in much more varied things than that, and if belief is power, those places have a lot of power.
But the places they believe in might not have room for everyone. Who are they keeping out, and where do those people go?
So the basic push of the story is about making more inclusive story worlds for more people to live in. Only in terms of heavens, afterlives, and dreams. If you can't even dream of a good place, of belonging in the good place, what happens when all that is left of you is a dream?
So somehow this English teacher has to open the borders of dream, of the English dream, the dream of England, and let in all those people who have always been here but never been in that story.
... yeah, this totally leads to big martial arts fights.
There have to be symbol walls and symbol doorways. Cliffs as symbol walls works, but not in Norwich as such. Symbol doorways are harder.
Mostly there are ghosts, and there are alive people. And they can mostly stay on their side of the curtain. But there's one character who, while living, can walk either way, and take others with her... and maybe leave them there. Which makes her powerful, and that makes a lot of people interested.
Slight problem in not having written it up earlier, this character now looks a lot like the ghost in Being Human. Except for being alive and completely different. But, they had a power over doors and pulled people through when they shouldn't and all. Is not the same as what I wanted to do, but it looks like an inspired by now.
Mostly I just like writing dream houses where you go in a new room and a new story lives there. So I keep inventing rules that make that happen. *shrugs*
I've got a bunch of characters.
There's just a slight problem where some of them... okay, basically one of them... remains fanfic. Andrew is being pretty stubbornly himself. Fanboy with a fascination for the supernatural. So far there are no demons in this 'verse hence no summoning them. He's not the same Andrew from my Giles/Ethan 'verse. I just can't get him to change names and faces.
The ghost possessing his dog also keeps trying to stay kind of like Oz. Him I'm pretty sure I can get to move though.
Neither of them have such violent pasts so far.
Actually everyone's past is a bit blank and not very interesting. Even Helaine, the Ethan alike. It's difficult to know what she could do, in this mostly spirits 'verse. Not worship Janus. I have other characters that do that. Except the whole doors and borders and crossing and liminal thing can fit with Janus rather well. Hrm. My other characters are mostly of the 'sees past and future' set. Different.
There's character elements that keep drifting between different characters. Like, having a child when still in school and meeting them now they're the same age as their mother was. If I reuse the element a lot it'll look like a Thing. I never had a kid in school. I just get this idea of roads not taken, of a life they could have lived, a life that could have existed since then and reached the same point. And then meeting them again, and hence confronting all your own choices, then and now. Whatever the two generations have done and will do, it's a strong story right there. So it ends up in the ghosts story, and in the visions story.
Not in the vampires story. That one isn't about growing up and reaching the same place, it's about never being able to leave that place. Never grow old, or grow up.
I have some characters rattling around who I know without knowing what they're about. It's hard to make plots for them, enemies or events, without knowing what they're about. The white cat, the hunter, the king of dust and ashes, the golden lady, the gloriana, the druid of the rooftop gardens and back yards. I know them all and I know how they fit together but I don't know what they do. I know the hotels and the All's Fair, but not why they'd be looking for each other or why they'd want to learn from the fools. And there's ways they fit with the world of the ghosts, with spirits swapping places with their dogs, but there's ways they don't. Different protagonists for sure. I don't know what an English teacher would learn from the cats, I just know they run where they will, and all places are alike to them. Borders wouldn't like them much. And they live on levels of reality that aren't as clear cut as the ghost vs human worlds.
Also, the ghosts and vampires are running around Norwich, mostly, maybe taking the 8 bus to Dereham and back again. The cats and all are in Dereham but also convention hotels and a bunch of other places. Not so geographically pinned down.
I could start with just the one properly worked out plot and write that up. I know how Helaine gets back in to Rachel's life, and how they connect up to the border crossing person, and who hunts them.
If the characters all belong in the one story I can throw Helaine at the courts a few times before the border guards get her. ... no, that isn't sparking anything. Especially because then she'd need to be a Name in the same form, and while my notes shorthand her description as Byronic butch I don't think that's on quite the same myth level. ... she's that variety of goth that's all frilly shirts and waistcoats and long tail coats and trousers with dagger patterns. It's bloke clothes, but they don't read masculine so much any more. Also she has a walking stick with a shiny, possibly from Alchemy Gothic. And big stompy boots.
Except when she's dying, where she has grey tank top and pyjama trousers, covered in blood.
As a ghost you can tell how powerful and confident she is feeling by how dressed up she gets. If she's getting beat she reverts to how she looked when she died.
The built in problem with Giles/Ethan where one of them is a ghost, or any same sex pair with one ghost, is that same thing I've complained many times, where same sex partners get dead. Writing it to fix it still means writing it again again again. Also, if the fix does not involve making them alive again, it is not entirely a fix. But the story idea I have is that tension with old ghosts, with pasts you never fully embraced, roads not taken as embodied in people who you never chose, and second chances in this fantasy form. Being in love with a memory is different than being in love with a ghost. Ghosts don't go back in the box. Much less convenient. Force you to confront the realities. See who they really were. All discovery and acceptance, and you can't call the police on them or put restraining orders on. Hence the potential for horror, but also other things.
I know the main problem I don't write this stuff is I mostly don't write, but I wrote 56000 words over the summer before discovering the story in question would require about three times more to finish it, so I apparently do write. I should try either finishing that story - which needs a different soundtrack and some dedicated time to get back into it, and it is term time and I don't know how much time I'll get - or starting shorter stories.
Also, the colder and darker it gets, the more I think the vampire stories again.
If I figure out what they're about and make a proper plot with an outline... hrm...
The thing with urban fantasy is it works best when it starts with the specific urban. It's applying poetry logic to a landscape, making symbols out of street signs. Sure, you can have vampires anywhere, but if it's just a blurry anywhere then it remains nowhere. If it's a specific corner of a specific street you can start making it work.
The vampire idea I have fully worked out I haven't written because it's horror based around domestic violence and I don't want to go there long enough to write it all down. I know which streets it happens on. Which classrooms. Not so much which houses, because I don't know if they're as swish on the inside as they look from outside or if they're converted into student housing, but I have the house clear in my head. Train station, riverside, cinema, bridge to the waterfront, dark twisty construction places, trying to run back to the light.
I know the thing with the wolves happens on Union street with a view of the park. Which is probably a bit unfair on Union Street since the newspapers were only reporting on the drugs den getting closed. But I can mix it with the place that got closed near me and end up with a story about really big dogs and people who choose to act like them.
The ghosts ideas are the richest. I had a whole set of story ideas worked out for Giles/Ethan fanfic that I think can work better if I flip them to being new characters. Today in my head they are Rachel and Helaine. Rachel works at City College teaching Shakespeare. ... but then I realise I've just swapped her in instead of my tutor and the incongruity in the different visuals kind of stalls my brain. But, Shakespeare it must be, because one unit is Hamlet and Dr Faustus, and the other is rewrites of Romeo and Juliet, and I can work with that in this ghosts and romance setting. Some ghost turns up and tries to get you to do things? Promises you can do magic if you just work with them? Renaissance unit, after the sonnets, half way through the semester when the year is drawing in. Things go all starcrossed? Well we know who they're not, but, culture does tend to go there. I'd have to invent units elsewise, which is much less efficient. I know TV always goes with Shakespeare when it's trying to make pretentious intertextual references but so it goes.
The big circle outside the bus station is clearly a transport circle. But only if it's not blocked. And you don't want randoms walking into the circle while you're trying to transport, so most of the day it's going to be too busy to work. I'm trying to figure if it only works while the bus station is open, or if it gets busy in the small hours.
The main thing about the ghosts 'verse is the contrast in martial arts styles built in. The humans are stuck doing things that are physically possible and when they get hit they get hurt. The spirits? Gravity optional is just the start. They're not trying to beat the physical stuffing out of another spirit, they're trying to break their will, their self belief. They're trying to prove that one of them is better and the other one has lost. That's an active incentive to do the fanciest stuff possible. And they can crowd surf, ride the will of the crowd for power. So they're playing to an audience, sometimes. If the audience doesn't believe in them, that backfires badly. Ghosts, when seen, can be made into shadows, by the force of disbelief. To survive at all a ghost needs one living person to believe in them enough to anchor them on this side. Otherwise they might have the strength of will to keep themselves together, but they can't get in. So, sometimes they'll show off for just that one person, and draw power from their belief. But if they can get a whole crowd to believe, the amount of power available is much much bigger... and much less likely to drain someone unconscious. Since crowds are much more likely to believe glowy see through figures are projected TV images than to properly believe, this is a difficult trick to work. Getting beat up and falling might actually help, since they're obeying the usual rules. Mostly though the scene I have in mind is somewhere that knows the dead person anyway and wouldn't be much surprised to see them do *anything*. Building up a rep in advance is helpful.
So I'm looking for plots that lead up to grand martial arts fights. Involving an English teacher. In Norwich.
... you can see the slight problem.
The main bad guys are the ones patrolling the borders. Like, the forces of chaos say, why not have ghosts hang out in the living world? So they exhaust the live people! So what? Is no fun being dead! We hang here! ... lots of alive people and actually quite a few dead ones think actually the dead should move on and leave the alive places for the alive people. So the forces of order say oy, time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
And then there's the next worlds. Is no useful if there's just heaven and hell and it's simple. People believe in much more varied things than that, and if belief is power, those places have a lot of power.
But the places they believe in might not have room for everyone. Who are they keeping out, and where do those people go?
So the basic push of the story is about making more inclusive story worlds for more people to live in. Only in terms of heavens, afterlives, and dreams. If you can't even dream of a good place, of belonging in the good place, what happens when all that is left of you is a dream?
So somehow this English teacher has to open the borders of dream, of the English dream, the dream of England, and let in all those people who have always been here but never been in that story.
... yeah, this totally leads to big martial arts fights.
There have to be symbol walls and symbol doorways. Cliffs as symbol walls works, but not in Norwich as such. Symbol doorways are harder.
Mostly there are ghosts, and there are alive people. And they can mostly stay on their side of the curtain. But there's one character who, while living, can walk either way, and take others with her... and maybe leave them there. Which makes her powerful, and that makes a lot of people interested.
Slight problem in not having written it up earlier, this character now looks a lot like the ghost in Being Human. Except for being alive and completely different. But, they had a power over doors and pulled people through when they shouldn't and all. Is not the same as what I wanted to do, but it looks like an inspired by now.
Mostly I just like writing dream houses where you go in a new room and a new story lives there. So I keep inventing rules that make that happen. *shrugs*
I've got a bunch of characters.
There's just a slight problem where some of them... okay, basically one of them... remains fanfic. Andrew is being pretty stubbornly himself. Fanboy with a fascination for the supernatural. So far there are no demons in this 'verse hence no summoning them. He's not the same Andrew from my Giles/Ethan 'verse. I just can't get him to change names and faces.
The ghost possessing his dog also keeps trying to stay kind of like Oz. Him I'm pretty sure I can get to move though.
Neither of them have such violent pasts so far.
Actually everyone's past is a bit blank and not very interesting. Even Helaine, the Ethan alike. It's difficult to know what she could do, in this mostly spirits 'verse. Not worship Janus. I have other characters that do that. Except the whole doors and borders and crossing and liminal thing can fit with Janus rather well. Hrm. My other characters are mostly of the 'sees past and future' set. Different.
There's character elements that keep drifting between different characters. Like, having a child when still in school and meeting them now they're the same age as their mother was. If I reuse the element a lot it'll look like a Thing. I never had a kid in school. I just get this idea of roads not taken, of a life they could have lived, a life that could have existed since then and reached the same point. And then meeting them again, and hence confronting all your own choices, then and now. Whatever the two generations have done and will do, it's a strong story right there. So it ends up in the ghosts story, and in the visions story.
Not in the vampires story. That one isn't about growing up and reaching the same place, it's about never being able to leave that place. Never grow old, or grow up.
I have some characters rattling around who I know without knowing what they're about. It's hard to make plots for them, enemies or events, without knowing what they're about. The white cat, the hunter, the king of dust and ashes, the golden lady, the gloriana, the druid of the rooftop gardens and back yards. I know them all and I know how they fit together but I don't know what they do. I know the hotels and the All's Fair, but not why they'd be looking for each other or why they'd want to learn from the fools. And there's ways they fit with the world of the ghosts, with spirits swapping places with their dogs, but there's ways they don't. Different protagonists for sure. I don't know what an English teacher would learn from the cats, I just know they run where they will, and all places are alike to them. Borders wouldn't like them much. And they live on levels of reality that aren't as clear cut as the ghost vs human worlds.
Also, the ghosts and vampires are running around Norwich, mostly, maybe taking the 8 bus to Dereham and back again. The cats and all are in Dereham but also convention hotels and a bunch of other places. Not so geographically pinned down.
I could start with just the one properly worked out plot and write that up. I know how Helaine gets back in to Rachel's life, and how they connect up to the border crossing person, and who hunts them.
If the characters all belong in the one story I can throw Helaine at the courts a few times before the border guards get her. ... no, that isn't sparking anything. Especially because then she'd need to be a Name in the same form, and while my notes shorthand her description as Byronic butch I don't think that's on quite the same myth level. ... she's that variety of goth that's all frilly shirts and waistcoats and long tail coats and trousers with dagger patterns. It's bloke clothes, but they don't read masculine so much any more. Also she has a walking stick with a shiny, possibly from Alchemy Gothic. And big stompy boots.
Except when she's dying, where she has grey tank top and pyjama trousers, covered in blood.
As a ghost you can tell how powerful and confident she is feeling by how dressed up she gets. If she's getting beat she reverts to how she looked when she died.
The built in problem with Giles/Ethan where one of them is a ghost, or any same sex pair with one ghost, is that same thing I've complained many times, where same sex partners get dead. Writing it to fix it still means writing it again again again. Also, if the fix does not involve making them alive again, it is not entirely a fix. But the story idea I have is that tension with old ghosts, with pasts you never fully embraced, roads not taken as embodied in people who you never chose, and second chances in this fantasy form. Being in love with a memory is different than being in love with a ghost. Ghosts don't go back in the box. Much less convenient. Force you to confront the realities. See who they really were. All discovery and acceptance, and you can't call the police on them or put restraining orders on. Hence the potential for horror, but also other things.
I know the main problem I don't write this stuff is I mostly don't write, but I wrote 56000 words over the summer before discovering the story in question would require about three times more to finish it, so I apparently do write. I should try either finishing that story - which needs a different soundtrack and some dedicated time to get back into it, and it is term time and I don't know how much time I'll get - or starting shorter stories.
Also, the colder and darker it gets, the more I think the vampire stories again.
If I figure out what they're about and make a proper plot with an outline... hrm...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2011-09-27 06:22 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnsHUH-MV2k
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Date: 2011-09-27 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 02:51 pm (UTC)Also very much set up so the women loving each other has nothing to do with why either of them ends up dead.
I shall ponder some more...