It is fantastically hard for me to finish stories I start working on. There is always a point where I get stumped on what I’m actually going to do next. (Alternately, I just keep writing worldbuilding and never get to the part where there are characters and an actual story.) It is extremely frustrating! I’ve been intermittently attempting to write much shorter story bits in hopes that I can ramp up to longer works from there, but I still have problems with whatever I’m working on.
The following is a list of stories I am (not) working on, either because I ran out of steam or I got distracted by something else. (Usually fan fiction. It is somewhat easier for me to write fan fiction, because there is already a framework that my story–which is usually an au or a crossover–can jump off of. They get really long, but I have trouble actually ever finishing them. Getting to a good stopping point is hard. Hard and annoying.) Note that a few of these stories are actually pretty dirty because I occasionally write smut.
Forest Room (working title.)
Protagonist went missing for six months when he was a teenager near his family’s vacation home. When he turns up he has no memory of where he’d been or what had happened, which caused Much Strife with his family. Years later, he returns to the vacation home to set it up for a family reunion. There, he discovers some disturbing things about his family and their dealings with the world on the other side of a magical portal. I did not get very far with this, possibly because the set up is faulty (The set up involved someone making a deal with what they thought were demons, but were not in fact demons.)
Eldritch Rhythms (a rare occasion in which the title gods smile upon me)
This was a fun urban fantasy concept that is sort of a serial numbers filed off sequel/same universe setting of one of my fan fics. Our Protagonist is the runaway high priestess of a cult worshipping Eldritch Gods. Protagonist would much rather be an r and b singer. This does not stop a) demon hunters from trying to kill her b) idiot sorcerers trying to ally with OR kill her OR try to use her in some other awful way c) disappointed phone calls from home because she never visits, hardly ever calls. Life becomes very interesting when a demon hunter with problems of their own tries and fails to kill her. Biggest problem here is that “how do things work in real life?” is an Ongoing Problem for me. Despite ostensibly living “in real life.”
Untitled And Probably Very Dirty Fic Involving Xeno
This one started out with the same first start up as Forest Room. (Someone making a deal with entities they thought were demons, someone has to pay for the deal being made) This set up was supposed to lead up to Protagonist getting “sacrificed” to the “demons” only what the demons were looking for was more along the lines of “host for their weird monster babies,” than “dinner.” I’m trying to work it into a slightly different, post apocalyptic story where someone gets caught by weird entities everyone thinks are demons but who are looking for hosts for their monster babies. (Considering the number of “Captured by the fill in the blank” stories on Amazon, this possibly has a market if I can get it to go anywhere. Or give it a title.)
Dungeoning with Dragons (swing and a miss for title?)
This is a not-quite-serial numbers scraped off reworking of a terrible ero manga. (Which I came up with after slogging through maybe twenty chapters of “dear god, I can do better.” And I can! I just can’t get it to go anywhere because I went too dark!) The basic concept of the manga was that dungeons are deliberately built by sorcerers in order to get magic, minions and allies. (Magic through alliances or simply draining the adventurers who come through, minions from enslaved former adventurers, allies from various “evil” species and so on.) Protagonist is a mage who is out for revenge and is also powerful enough to set up the process for creating a dungeon. I would need to rework this heavily to make it less horrifically dark, because otherwise, I can’t write it.
Untitled Mile High Stack of Worldbuilding I’ve Been Reworking for Decades
She was my first Original Character okay? I am not sure what name she’s currently using. (I started with Marrha, then Mara, then Narani for a while, except that’s a character in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books so.) The basic concepts for her were: a) Drains magic, or causes it to become inert. b) shape shifter c) outcast from a caste-based society d) (psychic ability) empath.
She started out very angsty because I came up with her first iteration in high school, which was a Very Stressful Time for me, but I eventually gave her a mildly confused/concerned family who love her but don’t know how to deal with the complex of her “condition.” (She’s disabled by their society’s standards and also probably by ours because her variation of empathy makes her *less able* to interact with others, not more. Her species tends to form gestalts within family and social groups, and she can’t do that at all.) I later tinkered with her species/culture/biology so that each of the castes are actually subspecies with different abilities that turn out to be very beneficial if they work together.
I was never able to get to an actual story for her? It’s been extremely frustrating. I’d get started, but the story would never really go anywhere, and I can’t outline at all. All I end up doing is working on the worldbuilding, without any story growing from it.
There are of course, other stories. I had one idea involving an orc given the responsibility of taking care of his former Overlord’s child. (Because I love me some accidental baby acquisition. Also complicated “everyone thinks this species is evil, but that isn’t so,” story lines. I have another idea where a wizard accidentally summons a robot from a roboapocalypse. (The robot is the good guy. The wizard is an idiot.)
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