Ideas

This page is a sort of catch-all bin of ideas for novels I may write in the future.

Demon Blood

This would be a spin-off of Ashen Blades centered around the life of James Simmons. He’s a fairy, like his mother, Lara, but he appears totally normal until probably the age of fifteen or sixteen, at which point he’s badly injured and needs an emergency transfusion.

The only person available at the time with a compatible blood type is the Hunter/Artemis Watson, a half-demon. She donates her blood and it activates all of the young man’s dormant powers.

He also turns out to be rather good at demon extermination, able to force demons to transform, with a touch. He uses this power to forcibly turn demons into weapons, which he uses to kill others. Best of all: his power fully drains his weapons of all magic, permanently killing them.

Unfortunately, he becomes a half-demon, and the demons now seek to use him in their plots to conquer the world, very similar to Artemis.

Thorn of the Rose (Working Title)

Sandra Blake loses her parents to an unexpected attack by a mysterious assassin. Her mother’s final words, “Don’t let it end like this” have a chilling effect on her life and Sandra transforms herself, both body and soul, becoming an incredibly skilled and dangerous woman.

After years of intense training, she enters the seedy underworld of modern society, exchanging stolen jewels for information on the man that killed her parents.

Her uncle, Daniel Malachi, seeks to bring her in from the field, to make her part of the Imperial Intelligence Core, which her oversees.

Naturally, they come into conflict, but Sandra goes through Malachi’s men like a lawn mower cuts grass. Nonetheless, when her uncle speaks to her, her resolve weakens and she agrees to work for him as a spy.

Will Sandra stay on task and do as she’s told, or will she go off-book to find the man she wants to punish?

This would be a rewrite of a novel I started in college (20 years ago), which I lacked the skill to finish at the time.

Some of my favorite qualities of Sandra were the contradiction between how much pain she feels and how capable she is, as well as her tendency to defeat high tech security gadgets with simple kitchen utensils. Add her total lack of understanding of computer software (she had a rudimentary understanding of networking cables, however, in the sense of knowing what they were and how to cut them) and she was quite fun to write.

This more modern variation would take place in the Northwestern Empire, likely during the time skip at the end of The Inverted Glass. Daniel Malachi was originally seen in Sky Children and also appeared in The Third Wish, after which he became the new spy master for the Empress of the Northwestern Empire.

While Malachi is a wizard, he doesn’t flaunt that ability and not even Sandra will know, at least until she needs to.

The original version of the novel opened with Sandra pretending to be a student at a clandestine school for spies on the first day of class, while their teacher was absent. This turned out to be ploy to avoid teaching, a task she never wanted, but since she’s pregnant, she’s been removed from active duty and relegated to teaching.

She teaches the Unconventional Tactics class, mostly by telling them her life story, which serves as an excellent example of doing everything the wrong way, while getting excellent results.

I’m not sure how much of the old novel will be used, but there’s plenty to build on and the experience of writing Sandra has had a lot of influence over the writer I’ve become.

Nothing Left to Chance

Death is a job passed from one mortal to another over the centuries, a job with a great many perks, including immortality, but the catch is a doozy: death is always scrambling collect to dark souls that need to be controlled. Worse, if Death fails and the dark souls are left unchecked, the world will come to an end.

Each Death begins normal enough, then comes to an end the usual way, but a long-standing bargain between humanity and the grim reaper entails an ancient ritual challenge: if a mortal can beat Death in any game, they gain immortality. The trouble is, Death can’t be beat, unless Death chooses to lose.

This has happened before and will inevitably happen again, because mortals were never meant to live forever, and sooner or later, the Reaper always tires of Reaping. It may take ten-thousand years or just ten, but all good things must come to an end.

The downside is that this usually involves all of the collected dark souls being released, which forces the new guy to pick up the slack, lest the world end.

Dragons, monsters, creatures of legend, even dark and forgotten gods with an ax to grind – they all have to be captured and contained.

Fortunately, the previous Reaper always sticks around for a while, usually in the form of a talking skull, because someone has to teach the new guy.

Each book in this series would bear only a tenuous connection to the rest and each volume in it can stand alone, with no need to write them in any particular order. Each would focus on a particular Reaper, though it’s possible I may find I like any given character and give them an extra volume or two.

The common elements of the series from Reaper to Reaper will consist of each facing terrible calamities in order to save the world, requiring some choice of vessel to contain the dark souls, which determines the powers they manifest. However, all Reapers share the power to manipulate and travel through time, which is essential for them to ferry the souls of the living to the afterlife.

In addition, they also have to choose something or someone to serve as their immortal companion. This is traditionally a horse, but there are a great many options available, including motorcycles, cars, other people, etc.

Chance on a Gamble

A young man that lives by gambling dies in a motorcycle accident and meets Death, who offers him a rare chance at immortality, through a game of poker.

He wins and becomes Death, while Death crumbles to just a powerless skull, which had been serving as the containment vessel.

After several women reject the opportunity, the young man chooses his motorcycle as his companion, which becomes imbued with life, then chooses to use his deck of cards and his dice to contain the souls. The powers he gains are extremely strong, but subject to random chance and tend to burn out after a while.

To challenge myself, I’ll come up with random effects to attach to the cards of a deck or the roll of the dice, then I’ll randomly choose as required to determine which power he gets at any given time. During the climax, he’ll finally find a way to stack the deck ahead of time, rather than shuffling.

The more souls he gathers, the less time it will take for individual cards to recharge after use.

Gunslinger’s Chance

The Reaper of the Old West era began as an outlaw gunfighter, who challenged death to a fast-draw contest of the sort favored in Westerns.

Death loses on purpose and the outlaw finally finds out about the fine print of the arrangement, forced to defend a world he hates, because the alternative is worse.

The outlaw chooses his horse as his companion and his pistol as the vessel. Each soul he captures will give him a unique power his bullets can manifest, based on the defeated monster.

Chance for a Soldier

A soldier that died on the battlefield during World War II defeats Death in a bare knuckle bar fight.

The soldier chooses his best friend as a companion and their fists serve to contain the souls. Each soul they collect will give them greater durability and physical strength, eventually becoming like super-heroes.

Together, they fight both dark souls and Nazis, but as they begin to sway the outcome of the war, Reapers from other eras appear, to stop them, lest they destroy the foundations of reality, by altering what was meant to be.

The Reapers brawl like no battle that came before and whole cities are decimated by the fighting.

Shinigami of Chance

At one point, the reaper was a Japanese samurai, who used his sword as the the vessel and his armor as his companion. His armor became imbued with life and the samurai came to think of it as being possessed by a helpful, yet very clever fox yokai.

This one chose to think of himself as a shinigami, rather than a Reaper.

A Chance Insight

The Reaper of this novel is a con artist that makes her living as a fake psychic or medium.

She chooses her crystal ball as both the containment vessel and her companion. She gains the rather unreliable power to gaze into the future, while her crystal ball starts talking and can shape shift at her command. She often uses it in the form of blunt instruments (like a mace), since it’s made of extremely durable and heavy quartz.

A Magical Chance

The Reaper from the 1960’s is the lovely assistant of a magician and also his wife.

She chooses her husband as her companion and makes magic itself the containment vessel, transforming it into more than a mere slight-of-hand trick.

The Last Chance

The previous Reaper chooses poorly and gives his power to a man that wishes to watch the world crumble, after losing his wife.

The Earth comes closer than ever to destruction as dark and evil energy fills the world, fracturing both time and space, bringing Reapers from the past into the present, each of them fighting to hold off the catastrophe, despite the fact they lack the power, since they’re only echoes of what was.

The new Reaper falls for one of the female Reapers of the past and she convinces him to care, through small acts of romance. He chooses her as his companion and together, they fight to end the catastrophe, but the world may be too far-gone to save.

In a strange twist, the Reaper chooses his bond with his new wife as his containment vessel and the attraction between them manifests as a force that may be just enough to seal the cracks in space/time, or possibly not…

This volume would likely be the last, a chance to bring the other main characters together for one big adventure, while elements of the real world, the future and even alternate histories mingle together.