Story Seeds: The Ideas That Are Still a Paragraph or Two

The last post in this thread is for the ideas that never got much past a pitch. Each one has a logline, a rough arc and a tagline, and that's about it. They're here so they don't get lost, and because a couple of ideas that started out this small have already turned into real projects.

Caged

A migratory ship, the Ark Horizon, is carrying Earth's animals to seed the ecosystem of a new planet. Partway there, a system failure opens the containment units. Bears, lions and other predators are loose in the corridors of a ship with nowhere to run. The first crew member dies in a narrow passage, and it gets worse from there.

The plan is a straight survival story: a captain holding things together, a head animal scientist wrecked with guilt over the failure, a security officer looking for redemption, and an engineer who improvises. Somebody doesn't make it. The survivors land and start over.

The tagline: "In space, no one can hear you roar."

It needs a new cast list before it goes anywhere. Two of its character names are already taken by another book of mine.

The Untutored

This one is quieter. In some future, extreme wealth disparity peaks and then the elite class starts to dwindle. The dream of getting rich, which was already out of reach for most people, becomes impossible.

The story follows an ordinary person who gives up on the hustle, finds other people chasing meaning over money, and ends up part of a grassroots movement toward community and a simpler, fuller life, with resistance from what's left of the old guard. The tagline: "From chasing the good life to building a better one."

There's no named character yet, and no setting beyond "a future society". It's a feeling and a direction more than a plot.

The Worst Timeline

This is the most developed of the three, and it's still thin. In 2023 the narrator's uncle, dying of cancer, confesses that he discovered time travel, tried to fix history, and made it worse. Reality split off somewhere around 2000, and they've been living in the worst timeline ever since. The fix, he says, is to go back to 1997, three years before the break.

So the narrator takes the journals and the machine and goes. The notes care a lot about getting 1997 to 2000 right: the early internet, the first cell phones, the limits of the tech. There's someone on the other side who likes the broken timeline just fine and works to keep it. And the ending is meant to leave the question hanging: is the new present better, or just different?

The tagline: "To save the future, go back to 1997." There's a bible from this June with a prologue, eight chapters and an epilogue. What there isn't: a name for the hero, a name for the villain, or an answer to what actually broke in 2000.

Two that already moved out

Eternal Battlefield was a one-page concept about a warrior reborn across a galactic war who remembers every past life. It turned out to be the same idea as a project I'd started a month earlier, and it's now folded into Savestate.

Space Poem came from a dream: a rookie crew sent to fetch a poem from a genius boy, with 80s teen-movie energy in space, and the twist that the poem was inspired by someone on their own ship. That seed grew into a whole book, The Starship Ginsberg.

Note

A seed that sits in a drawer long enough either gets planted or gets forgotten. Writing them down here is the cheap way to keep them in the first pile.

Update: this one has a working page now, and the chapters will show up there as I write them: The Worst Timeline.