Original Fiction Musing

While I am reminded of it. Follows on from these two posts, more or less. Just a musing based on a conversation I had with leomona (who I hope won't mind). I just want to store it somewhere.

She asked me where my original worlds came from. My answer was this:

- Huh. That's ... sort of complicated? The places they come from ... Okay. A lot of them do carry varying degrees of influence from things I was reading/watching around the time I conceived them, but almost none of them are directly based off anything external. A surprising amount of them, for example, come from dreams I've had. The, ah, the moment of conception is usually related to a basic scenario/image that comes into my head, from which I usually come away with a couple of characters, and from there I build the worlds around them to best explain the conflict/details of the initial scenario.

Um. An example would be, say, Ellysian Dreams/Necropolis Dreams. That was born out of a dream I had of a man drinking hot chocolate and arsenic beneath a tower (don't ask me where the dreams themselves come from, that part I've no clue). I needed a reason why this man would be capable of drinking arsenic as a leisure activity. So, scenario, he's drinking poison because possibly he's already dead. So. Undead. What are the towers? Based on things like the anime Metropolis, which had a robot controller inside a ziggurate, I figured maybe the towers were what allowed the dead to walk around the place. And he's drinking it at a public cafe, which *served* him it, which suggests full public awareness of his condition. So. From a man drinking arsenic for leisure, in public, beneath a tower, we start to build a world where death and undeath are part of the culture. From there, we start to add more characters in around. Who is the man? Who can he interact with, and why? What, in this world, would be the *plot*? If undeath is a matter of public knowledge, how do that public react to it? What conflicts are coming from that? And who would represent them? So we have Ivan, the undead man, and Tynne, a protester against the industry of death. Later, Jacques, to run interference, and link out to a wider circle.

Basically, in most cases, that's what happens. There will be an initial image/scenario, sources varying, sometimes just a challenge for a game, or a scenario I want to see, or a dream I've had. I'll take that initial image, cull out some pertinent details to start a world from, most often pull out a couple of key initial characters, and then let the world snowball from there. Some images/scenarios, like in the iteration stories, will yield up multiple stories. It's just ... Um. They snowball. They start out innocently enough, just coming to me, and then ... they go all big and complicated and long, and before you know it I have metric tonnes of backstory and fifty characters and it's all ... rather confusing really. *grins* But an awful lot of fun. Heh.

Meme

Meme from trobadora that tickled my fancy:

Pick up the nearest book to you.
Turn to page 45. The first sentance describes your sex life in 2012.

Considering that the nearest book to me happened to be "Great Cities of History", which gets us this:

"Here the solidarity and self-determination of the world's first true democracy - enacted before the word demos-kratia was invented - was made flesh."

Of course, me being asexual, barring something huge happening my sex life in 2012 is going to be nonexistant, but it seemed sort of fun. And my result ... wasn't too bad? *grins faintly*

My parents, who happened to be in the same room, weren't nearly so lucky:

Mother - "This makes sense only if the body were tilted on its side with the side-wound oriented momentarily toward the ground and then turned up on the other side so that the flow could make its way transversedly across the back towards the ground."
I ... don't even want to know, really -_-;

Dad - "He repeatedly distinguished himself by acts of courage in protecting his parishioners in some of the most dangerous locations in the world."
... Nope. Not going there.

Although it must be said, apparently they have an adventurous year ahead of them -_-;