In no particular order, here is a list of the story ideas I want to pursue this year. Some of these stories are more developed than others. Some I have tentatively named, but most of the time I don’t know what to call it until I’ve written at least half of the story.

The Pyschic on the Jury

This is a direct follow-up to The Repossessed Ghost. I’m writing it in such a way that it will not contain any spoilers for the first book. The basic idea is that Mel gets selected for jury duty. One does not have to worry about “reasonable doubt” when you can simply go to the scene of the crime and rewind time, or pick up the murder weapon and look through the eyes of the killer. So what will it be like when Mel is the only one that seems to know the truth? I have a very interesting twist lined up for this story. It might wind up being a little bit darker than The Repossessed Ghost, but I think it will be very enjoyable, just the same. I’m about 4500 words into this. I expect it to be under 12,000 words when finished, but it might go a little bit longer.

Unnamed Sequel Novel to The Repossessed Ghost

This is one I’ve been thinking about ever since I finished The Repossessed Ghost. I have some ideas for very interesting characters that will show up in this story. We might meet Mel’s father. There will definitely be other psychics with different gifts than Mel. There will be more ghosts, as that seems to be Mel’s specialty. But The Society has bigger scale issues to focus on, and they’re going to need more people. A big part of this story will be Mel going out into the world to find and recruit more people like him, so that when the end times are upon us, there will be people ready to defend us from the things that go bump in the night.

A Heist at the Center of the Galaxy

I have more research to do, but I want to start working on my Truckstop at the Center of the Galaxy story sooner than later. My initial idea is a heist. The Truckstop, as I understand it, rests at a nexus between different galaxies. What better way to get away with ill-gotten goods than to pass it through such a nexus, and hide it in completely different space? Of course, when you open a door, things can pass the other way, too, so things won’t go exactly as planned. I have a lot of work to do on this one. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, though, and I’m looking forward to tackling it.

The Plant Necromancer Story

I’ve talked about this story before, and I still want to do it. At the edge of a village lives a kindly old woman that makes certain that the crops survive, even when the weather is rough, or when the rats and vermin get into the fields. She is beloved by the village, even if she sometimes asks for strange things, like a bucket of pig’s blood. She keeps to herself for the most part. That is, until a grieving mother discovers her secret: she’s a necromancer. The grieving mother will approach the old woman with a proposition: bring her child back to life, and the secret stays safe.

I’ve done a little bit of work on this story already. I have an outline. I know who the POV character is, now. I thought it was going to be the necromancer herself, but now I think it’s going to be the grieving mother. I need her to by sympathetic, and she’s the most active person in the story, so she’ll make a good protagonist. At this point, I just need to take the time to sit down and write it.

Everything else

There are a handful of novels I still want to finish. I started a cyberpunk novel for NaNoWriMo, but I did not finish it. The dystopia was too real, and I got depressed the deeper I got into it. I think it can still be a good story, though, so I want to try it again at some point.

I still want to write the Bourne Identity meets Game of Thrones idea I had in A Clean Slate. It’s a novel I started in 2011 that I did not have the skill to write at the time. There are some really good ideas there, and I think I can pull it off now. It’s lower on my priority list, though. It’s a straight-up fantasy story, and I’m not sure that’s where my interests lie right now.

Speaking of fantasy, there is a trilogy of novels I want to write that follow some of my favorite character voices I’ve roleplayed or written over the years. I started the first one for NaNoWriMo many years ago, and I made it about 15,000 words into it before time constraints got the best of me and I failed that year.

I have some other ideas, but none of them are exciting me enough to talk about right now. That’s how it is, sometimes. I’ll get the seed of an idea and it’ll stick in my mind. It won’t be enough to develop into anything, but as long as I’m thinking about it from time to time, watering it with interest and new life experiences, the seed takes root, and before long, it becomes the next story that I have to write. That’s how it was with Synthetic Dreams. I suppose that’s how it was with The Repossessed Ghost, if you consider Mel Walker himself to be the story seed. I carried him for over a decade before I finally gave him a shot, and it was a decade later when he became my first published novel.

The future looks bright. I can’t wait to fill it with more stories.