Still haven't found a decanter of sherry...

Dreams

50,218 / 75,100 (66.9%)

Two-thirds done!

And Liz may be a pain in the ass, but she also says things like An excellent example of the use of passive voice to avoid culpability.

Mining LJ for ideas

My neck withstood shoulder stand and plow pose this morning, so I think I can safely climb in a bit. But now it's time to talk about vague ideas in hope of sparking something solid.

A while ago, matociquala gave me a sandbox challenge: no Lovecraft, no romance, no transformations, set on Yap. I decided that to make it a real sandbox, it should be SF. (Okay, so a real challenge would be litfic or something, but no.) I set the idea aside and went on with life. But last week it started to bubble.

First it decided that we couldn't use Yap, because matociquala has the planet Yap in Undertow, and probably doesn't want me writing weird-ass fanfic in her nice universe. So I decided to make the planet Ulithi. A nice little ocean planet full of archipelagos and atolls. Then a few characters started to trickle in. Vern the cop (sorry, magicnoire) and her (ex?) partner (played by Natalie Mendoza and a young Gary Busey, respectively). Morgan Freeman and his jaunty pirate earrings are wandering around looking for a name.

Having cops running around, I realized that the plot should be modeled on 80s cop/action movies. Hence the recent Miami Vice marathon. Speed boat chases! Smugglers! Shoot outs in kelp beds! Pet alligators!

And then the real trouble hit--a title. It even stole a title away from the Fishsexstravaganza, which in fairness wasn't putting out at all. So now I have an unbook called Salvage. And from that title I know it's a book about vigilantism and revenge, about rescue and redemption, and of course about hauling things out of the sea.

So now I need a few other things before I can start to grow a plot: a shiny SFnal idea, a thematic question or argument, and aliens.

I'm half-tempted to swipe some sentient kelp and mysterious kelp girls from a lesser-known Herbert book, but I'll see if I can't think of something else first.

Anyone have any clever ideas?