I think I need to work in 4 hour shifts as opposed to the 8 hour ones I work. It has nothing to do with work itself, but I have all these ideas for my stories that never get written down because the creative side of my brain gets worn out midway though my shift and gives up. Since I have no time to jot down notes, I just need shorter shifts. Simple.
Ok, so that is really not why I wanted to post. I have been getting a lot of ideas while working. Some of these ideas are good, some are bad, and some are just fun. Most of the ideas center around my Rogue stories. Most of the ideas popping up tend to be outside the scope of the two stories I have going. While most of them seem to be pulling together two separate story lines I had into a single cogent story, some are going further back and will change (for the better) large portions of R1 and some smaller ones in R2.
The changes deal with Gibson's mother (Gibson is the main character). My first note for her reads Mother/Colette: dead. That was how important she was before I started writing R1. I had a vision of what I wanted Gibson's childhood to be like, and she wasn't in it. She was just a plot device to turn Gibson's father into a drunken shell of a man and essentially give Gibson an emotionally absent childhood that he wanted to escape from. Later, as I was writing R1, she was turned into a thief. She had left to steal something from Castle Saramis and died in the process. This same 'quest' becomes Gibson's and is the main point of R1. Of course, he does this more to impress a girl that because of his mother, but still, his mother's role was extended. So the fresh, new idea for his mother: reincarnation. Ok, so reincarnation is neither fresh nor new, but in this case, I think it could be fun.
I am not sure how apt a spoiler warning will be since I will probably never finish any of my stories anyways, so no one but me will ever read them, but I guess I will say it anyways: READING FURTHER HAZARDOUS.
A brief history: Something like 500 years prior to R1, this Stone Arm (Stone Arm is one of the four main deities in my world) worshiping warlord sets out to prove his worth to his god by killing the followers of Old Oak (diametrically opposed deity). Putting the story in a nutshell, the essence of Old Oak was put in an acorn, which the warlord took. Him and his sister (who he took as his wife) became the rulers of Saramis and set out to destroy other being of magic. (Side note: I kind of think of anyone a deity has 'noticed' as a person of power, and they can do pretty much whatever the plot calls for. So living hundreds of years, turning to stone, traveling though shadows, talking to ground...and it answering are all within reason for these people assuming it makes sense given the deity.) Trapping one god and going around killing people of power really messed up the balance of power. History lesson over.
The original goal for Rogue was to bring magic back to the world. The balance of power was broken, and it was Gibson's task to fix things. Well, he was supposed to steal back the acorn Old Oak was trapped in and set him free thus helping to reestablish the balance. Anyways, as I was writing this dribble, I decided that Gibson's mother had been given the same task when he was a boy, failed, died, and was sort of posthumously passing it off on Gibson. This seemed to work, and while not justifying her leaving to Gibson, at least gave her a reason.
So back to the reincarnation thing. The idea is that, saw 100-150 years ago, Gibson's mother killed a person of power. For her effort, she was cursed to live life after life until she completed the goal of freeing Old Oak. She is born, lives a normal carefree life for some random amount of time, then suddenly remembers everything, and sets off to try again. So her most recent reincarnation happened before Old Oak was freed but sometime after Gibson was born...making her new self younger than her son.
Regardless of whether I use the reincarnation idea or not, just thinking about it and trying to see how it would/could fit in has given me a myriad of ideas for R1 that won't require me to keep the reincarnation idea later if I decide it is a dumb idea. Basically, it has let me see tons of missed opportunities in R1...yet more reasons I am glad I have not gone back to it yet.
Oh well, enough with ideas, I did make some actual progress. After jotting down some ideas, I did get a page or so written in R2, finishing up a chapter I left hanging back in December. I had been intending on editting that chapter out, but I thought it was too fun so I am retooling it. Gibson has always been unnaturally good at what he does but he always balanaced that by keeping a low profile. This chapter was basically Gibson showing off his skills, which had an element of fun I normally don't write in, but I decided that there needed to be consequences. It is something I revisit from time to time basically trying to offset the large skillset I gave Gibson by having a pride vs humilty debate.
And my followup to Script Frenzy, which I mentioned just over a month ago...there is no followup. I am not doing it. Everytime I would sit down to work on it, I would just crank out ideas for other stuff or get totally distracted by the how big I could make the story if I was really dedicated to it. The story I was going to use, if I ever wanted to 'tell' it properly, would require money, a lot of effort, and span a long period of time (the longer the better). All in all, it just isn't worth it to me right now.
