Monday, May 08, 2006

Phase 1: Collect Story Ideas... Phase 2: ???... Phase 3: Profit!

Yes, I'm reviving my writing career.  I did some thinking on my way back to DC yesterday, and have decided to give it another crack.  Besides, why waste such staggering talent on the blogosphere?  Anyway, here's a list of novels you won't find me writing:
  • Aspiring writer laments being stuck at dead-end job.  Sympathetic to artists, and anti-corporate.  Moral of the story... everybody follow your dreams!  This has never been done before, so I'm a bit hesitant to venture into such unchartered territory.
  • Group of twentysomething friends comes to terms with aging and mortality.  Grunge song lyrics included as blockquotes.  Like The Big Chill, but with less promiscuous sex... after all, it would be based on my friends.
  • A serial killer is knocking off each member of the Yankees' 40-man roster one at a time... and only Detective Moishe Feinberg can stop them!  (Honest to God, four years ago I wrote the story outline for this, and you will never read it.  Ultimately, I decided I'd rather go to Hell as a software developer than be rich and famous because of Soxploitation literature.)
  • A family epic that sweeps across 18 generations of dysfunctional Acadians, reaching all the way back to Sieur de la Verdure, and demonstrates that our sons and daughters are doomed to repeat the failures of their forefathers.  The book would be 20,000 pages long and inspire a rash of suicides.
  • A book series with a title pattern that's better than anything in the books.  "Murder in Wyoming, the latest installment in Jeff Doucette's United States of Murder series, will blow your intestines into your brain... and back!!!"  But seriously, what detective could have CIs in fifty states?  That's not even getting into Puerto Rico, or DC, or island properties like Guam or American Samoa, let alone the tiny uninhabited islands in the South Pacific.  There's nobody there to get murdered, and even if someone had, who would care?  Nobody atoll, that's who.  (You've just been punk'd.)
  • An appealing, boy-and-girl band with a positive message is formed by enormous corporations, signing each band member to a lifetime contract with enormous financial incentives.  The band itself is basically The Breakfast Club.  Lovable at-risk kids who fight the power with music.  The band's feel-good brand of music attracts the youth of America, and they become a huge success.  But once they become popular, we begin to see their intended effect... American teenagers become lulled into satisfaction by the band's positive messages, thereby deflating their teen angst and reducing youth activism and political involvement in general, which removes a thorn from the side of U.S. business interests.  Slowly, the band becomes aware of this and attempt to rebel against their record company.  Somebody or everybody dies, and it sets off a massive Do The Right Thing-type riot climax, except with white kids instead of black adults.  All hell breaks loose, and there's no resolution, just a whole lot of rioting.  (The reason I won't write this novel is that it's actually a screenplay.)

1 comment:

  1. how about a fake memoir about a guy who earns millions, and chooses to give it to his alma mater. But the catch is he hated his alma mater, so wants to attach strings to it that will cause the most havoc. It's enough money that they can't say no.
    It'd be like You Shall Know Our Velocity, except with revenge in place of guilt as the lynchpin.
    And who doesn't like revenge?
    Chapter 1: Frank Rusch and the Uppies.

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