About vampires.
“Nice try, writing a horror novel”, the publishing house said.
But, I wasn’t trying to write a horror novel.
It’s about vampires.
I have several projects in various stages of…starting. They are, variously, about:
The death of Death, and the rights of men and gods.
An obsessive royal guard-turned-diplomat who’s hunting vampires when he should be hunting something else.
A young woman in Victorian England who is a member of the mysterious “Ladies Helpful Society”, established to defend Queen and Country from diabolical steampunkish threats.
A post-Apocalyptic fantasy with zombies and Cthullhu monsters, and the main character is a former paramedic trying to put her world back together at a quasi-military camp. Friendship, love, hot sex, betrayal, and moving on.
The second book takes place six years after the first one. The main character is the villain of the first book, trying to save the world, win the love of the woman he betrayed, and just maybe find redemption.
Third book is the woman’s daughter, the world in the centuries following a squiddy Apocalypse, and how magic works. I’m rather stuck in this one.
All I have is a title: “Serial Murder In A Parallel World”
I think it’s an inter-dimensional detective story.
I have two that I am sort of working on:
A book store owner who meets, befriends, and has a falling out with God, The Devil, and Death in rapid succession.
A story about two men who wake up one day and realize that they are gods.
Oops, that was supposed to be me. Forgot to login to my own account first.
My work-in-progress: Jared doesn’t realize that he’s the great-great-great grandson of the god of nightmares. Islene does know she’s the descendent of the god of dreams, and that her family hates Jared’s. Due to a fertility lab error (or maybe divine malice) they end up with children who are of both family lines. Things get complicated when the Gods realize that Jared and Islene’s sons are half-brothers, and decide that the little boys should die. Despite the myths to the contrary being a demigod has no special perks at all, so it’s two mere mortals tying to outwit divinity.
Well, I’m not even writing them, but have ideas in my head, and two are plays/musicals, not novels.
The first is a collaboration between me and a friend from college. It’s “Anne Frank: The Musical.” He thought up the idea, but figured I would be better to write it (I don’t know why he thought that, I don’t really do anything creative.) It has several things, including a love affair between Anne Frank and Goebbels, Hitler revealing himself to be Anne Franks’ father, and a lightsaber duel (did I mention it’s a farce?) Funny story…my friend had never seen “The Producers” before he came up with this idea, but we never knew that, so one day we decided to watch it, and he just stood up and started yelling that Mel Brooks stole his idea. 
The second idea is also a play, and possibly musical. It revolves around a man committed in a mental hospital because he thinks he’s a superhero. He sees his main doctor as his arch-enemy, one of the orderlies is his sidekick, etc…
The last is a novel about a man named Jonas who fights zombies.
A historic fiction based (very loosely) on the true story of the first South African in London - Khoi chieftain kidnapped in 1613 to learn English.
A fantasy set at around the same time (~1600), about an evil shipwrecked Portuguese sailor with Illuminati-type ties who is here to recover a vimana hidden by a Khoi secret society, and a young Khoi shaman who sets out to stop him before he can put all the clues together. I see it jumping from a present-day person tracing the mystery (and opposed by the descendants of the Illuminati-like organisation), and the shaman’s narrative.
Oooooh! A vimana!
Lessee, I got three completed novels out in ebook form:
Karg, about a space explorer from Earth’s future who gets stranded on a lost Earth colony full of dinosaurs and barbarians
Siren7, a romance about a young wannabe journalist who has body issues (everyone tells her that with her looks she could make good money as a stripper, but she wants to be a print journalist so her body will not be a factor in her succeess) and hence has trouble finding work (nobody believes someone who looks like her really wants to be a print journalist). An evil publisher hires her and then tries to blackmail her into becoming his sex slave – can she escape his clutches with the help of the hunky editor she has met online and who in real life turns out to be one of the other editors working for the evil publisher?
And the PowersPack of Short Stories, a group of short stories about a variety of things, like what REALLY happened to Princess Gaia after she was enslaved by evil gangster Jiggi the Hunn when she tried to rescue her boyfriend Hans Oleo from him (all resemblances to certain other enslaved princesses STRICTLY coincidental) and The Wrangler, about a gangster who is charged with keeping a kidnapped woman on ice, but has to cope with a double cross.
I’m currently 97 percent through with “The Final Veil” a detective story about a kidnapped belly dancer. Here’s the blurb I’ve written up for it:
April Dancer – a beautiful Gorean slavegirl who’s also the best damn belly dancer on the planet. She’s been all over television, a living advertisement for the beauty and grace of belly dance, and an openly acknowledged Gorean slavegirl, which rankles some people to no end. When she disappears, the call goes out to John Bowman.
John Bowman – a detective for the new millenium. Plugged in, turned on, online, and yet an outsider. With his crew of technical specialists, and his personal willingness to make it with beautiful women and knock heads with bad guys, he’s able to bring resouces to bear that get results.
Who kidnapped April Dancer? One of her lust-crazed fans from her days as an exotic dancer? The Mothers of Propriety, a collection of morally snooty types? A shadowy Opus Dei CIA cowboy? Or the ALFALFAns (the Alliance of Lesbian Feminists Against Legalized Fucking and Assault) a collection of womyn who despise myn? A rival belly-dancing troupe? Or was it a bunch of desperate TV-crazed nutjobs? Can John Bowman find her before someone decides that murder is no worse than kidnapping and leaves no witnesses?
Aaaaand I’ve got half a dozen other works in progress when I can find the time.
Other than that, I got nothin’.
My current project is tentatively entitled “The Imperial Trans-Temporal Trading Company & Other Marvels of Modern Science”, and is a collection of short stories heavily inspired by the Paratime universe of H. Beam Piper and Victorian Adventure yarns.
In the current story, the main character (who is from the future) finds himself in Natal on January 22nd, 1879, looking for one of his colleagues who was surveying a site at some place called “Isandhlwana”. He arrives there about 30 minutes too late, and then realises that he needs to get his colleague’s body and the technological equipment he has back to the future before someone finds it and starts asking questions. Unfortunately, the nearest place he can make a time-jump from is a nearby small mission station by the name of Rorke’s Drift…
An American ad writer living in Japan who comes up with the ultimate evil ad campaign.
Gee, I wonder what I’m basing this on?
My still-untitled novel-in-progress is, in the nuttiest of nutshells, about an ex-klansman chemistry PhD who hates himself.
It’s a collection of short stories. They’re about, in no particular order: some things that happened to me, some things that never did, ideas about how my life could have gone differently, dreams I’ve had, a teen romance that involves an escape from a hospital, and a fairy tale about talking sharks.
I’m not working on one novel right now. I’ve got…4 at various stages of progress, two in editing, another one that I need to start very soon for a deadline, seven (technically they aren’t all novels. Some are novella length) I need to start before the end of the year to meet deadlines, and 34 more on the queue (or 40. We’re having a bitch of a time keeping it straight and it doesn’t help that my writing partner went and added twelve more last week).
Between this week and December, we’re going to have 8 new releases.
They’re all different, but I guess they share a few basic points. There’s lots of love and sex, and some of them are pretty violent. Gay, straight, threesomes, paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, western…we’ve got something for everybody!
I forgot to mention the landing is by two 18 year olds.
<checking to make sure I did write 1967>
I’d have titled it *Vimanarama! * too, if it wasn’t for that bastard Grant Morrison getting there first!
Set in the not-so-distant future, where Madonna wins an Oscar (later revoked) for her starring role in Schindler’s List: The Musical - Michael Cates is set up and accused of murdering the aging Hollywood heart throb, Alan Weed. Things get more complicated when word leaks that Weed was gay, Mike is surprised to learn he has inherited Weed’s entire estate worth billions, a Hollywood film studio might actually be behind the murder, a gay porn film studio might hold the clue to solving the murder, another famous actor knows where the skeletons are buried, the local television reporter (“For the last time, no I am NOT a lesbian, dammit!”) is digging up some dirt and the hot detective assigned to the case seems to like being the passive recipient of Mike’s fetish for men in uniform.
Oh, and then there is the other murder, but in the meantime, Mike’s mother flies out from Chicago to help clear her son and meet a few celebrities to impress her bridge club back home and, with any luck, someone might score tickets to Cher’s farewell concert, assuming the silent, Hovercraft wheel chair is completed by showtime.
Every idea in this thread has been done.
(my novel’s about a compulsive killjoy)