Origin Stories

I have so many drafts that it was hard to find specific stories, so I organized them into folder by books and genres. Additionally, I created a spreadsheet listing all my drafts with key metadata, so I can search, sort, and filter the spreadsheet to find stories and link commonalities like shared characters, locations, and themes.

One type of story I labelled “origin stories” as they have potential to become a series or novel. These draft stories are in inventory:

John Doe (13k words) – He is a homeless man recruited by a mob hitman to find a female witness who lives somewhere in that neighborhood. He ends up saving that woman through an alliance with a police lieutenant at the local station. Through the local soup kitchen, he forms a friendship with a priest and becomes involved in that priest’s church. In the first story, the man remains a mystery about who he is and his purpose. Ultimately, I think this series will become about redemption and accepting one’s past as this character is haunted and broken down by something in his past.

Myles on Patrol (17k words) – A military veteran recovering from a TBI tries to find meaning and purpose in his life by going on patrol in his violent urban neighborhood as he had during a postwar occupation overseas before an IED scrambled his brain. He becomes a vigilante fighting street crime at night within the few blocks of his neighborhood. In the first story, he dreams a relationship with a waitress that he has been protecting at night by watching over her from a distance as she walks home. Ultimately, this series will be about a lonely, crippled man trying to find purpose in his life again after he is no longer capable of doing what he had previously devoted himself to.

Silas the Lawyer (13k words) – Silas is a lawyer and single father of a young girl named Sophia. His team includes Kevin (his investigator and former army subordinate) and Valerie (his office manager/nanny). In the origin story, his ex-wife Mary (who abandoned him and Sophia for a new man) returns to beg for protection from her abusive boyfriend John (that new man). A siege occurs as John attempts to break into Silas’ place. During the story, using his wits, Silas determines that John is simply off his meds and needs psychological treatment. As a series, it would be about Silas using reason to help different people out of problems they created by being unreasonable.

Haruka Chases Tom (only 800 words, so more a scene) – Humorously, this is like a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon about a woman chasing and attempting to seduce her male neighbor, so obviously she will have to receive packages of products from Acme as the series progresses. The origin story is simply a setup in which she propositions him in the elevator, but he denies her; however, she is obviously not done. This series will be about the relationship between free will and sex by dramatizing how feminine power (aka feminine voodoo) causes a man to stop thinking conceptually and be reduced to the perceptual thinking of animals. Colloquially, this process is referred to using terms like “d*ck thinking,” “thinking with the little head instead of the big head,” and “post-nut clarity.”