Nights off

A night off the booze. Wifey will never believe it. Just like I can't believe that TTSUD is apparently one of the 12 steps.

Excuse me while I flounder with my lack of inspiration a moment, it'll come, aaaaaany second... now!

...

Now!

Last time I wrote something about writing - something in a blog context I choose to call "metablogging", because I like how that sounds (and I'm very disappointed to see it's already in wide use and is apparently a cliché). I guess technically that makes this "metametablogging". Or perhaps navel-navel-gazing. Where was I?

Last time. Wroting. Writing. Actually looking through that blog-Cliché-blog is a little dispiriting. Apparently my whole folksy-charm-writing-like-a-conversation thing is clichéd. And what's really annoying about that is the fact I have to concentrate every time to do the little é thing.

As I mentioned last time, I'm partly following Wifey's lead on blogging. It's an opportunity to develop a style (clichéd or not) and, I'd hope, to start exploring some of the story ideas I have. Most of my ideas are fairly sci-fi (and certainly distinct from science-fantasy) and some have fairly dark elements. I take a lot of inspiration from current affairs (as much as I can claim to follow such things), as well as other stories and characters.

One of my more bizarre combinations of inspiration I'll share, having abandoned it as being a bit of a one-trick (maybe three-trick) pony (to say nothing of just being wierd)...

• Space Elevators - I love the concept
• Episodic - like a TV series
• Clever, cunning, resourceful main character (i.e. me but perhaps with less hair)
  
• A little bit (okay, more than I'd like to admit) of Hotel Babylon (not that I ever watched it)

Put that all together and you get a story about a passenger capsule (one of dozens) that goes up and down the elevator, staffed by our hero (and perhaps a sidekick) who gets into scrapes with his passengers all of which are overcome through cleverness etc. Can't believe I wrote all that down. My ideas for things that would happen:

• Transporting a valuable but random special cargo, like award-winning mice (seriously, that was my idea)
• One passenger conspires to kill another through clever engineering/messing with the capsule to drive her (don't know why it was a her) to have a heart attack
• Another capsule on the elevator is taken over by terrorists who disable it and send it plummeting towards Earth - our hero and sidekick save the day etc

But that really was it, a fairly random set of ideas that, even if you overlook the madness inherent in the idea, wasn't really going to go anywhere.

Although maybe if they were award-winning gerbils...