Your idea for the novel you (probably) will never write

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Putting this here for now-- don’t think it really belongs in Cafe Society, but mods are welcome to move it.

I participate, infrequently, on a true crime MB, and I’ve had a couple of crime theories, one that probably isn’t true, but I think is interesting, and fits the facts pretty well, and seems like it would make a great novel. Another, also, that I think would have a lot of truth that would make sort of “reverse twist” ending.

My first idea is that Dan, otherwise known as DB, Cooper, and hereafter referred to as DC, was Canadian, and went directly to Canada after his parachute jump. The hijacked plane was from an airport very close to Canada-- not by any stretch the airport with the greatest resources in the US.

From what I can gather, the FBI did not reach out to Canadian banks they way it did to US banks in looking for the recorded bills. The FBI neither reached out to Canadian investigators immediately after the crime, working on the assumption that Cooper did not cross the border, albeit, it was as easy to do so as crossing from one state to another. No passport was required.

Cooper could have had the requisite military background, in Canada, something else which, as far as I can tell, was not investigated.

More: you could open an account in a Canadian bank with US cash in the 1970s, and “Dan Cooper” was the hero of a comic published by Belgium, only in French, and about a Canadian paratrooper, and distributed in Canada.

In my novel, DC speaks French, and makes it to Quebec in the immediate hours after the hijacking, after first crossing the Canadian border at Washington, State. He then lives “openly invisible” to the FBI.

My other idea is a Jack the Ripper novel.

Not so many details worked out here, but I’d just follow the timeline of the crimes as they happened, filling in reasons for things like changes in victimology-- he attacks a younger woman in the Mary Kelly case, and so much more savagely, because he is presented for the first time with the ability to work inside, for example-- Mary Kelly had a room, and all the others slept in doss houses.

My twist if you want to call it that, is that he cuts himself when committing one of the murders, and at the end is dying of sepsis from the wound. That’s why the killings stopped. He’ll die anonymously and be buried in a pauper’s grave, although I don’t go that far.

He has a rented room at the beginning, but loses it, and progresses to doss houses. The last things he owns are the clothes he wears and a set of knives he refuses to pawn.

At the end, someone asks his name, and I don’t supply it, but do have someone comment either that they’re never heard of him, or that they’ve got ten others with the same name. Just something to drive home the point that whoever he was, he probably wasn’t anyone famous at the time, which pretty much all people accused since have been.

2

I never put much thought into writing a novel, but once upon a time, I was going to write a musical called “Letters from Kamp” and all the songs would be letters written by various members of the Kamp family to various people, businesses, and govt agencies. This was in the 70, pre-email, so it was a clever premise. :rofl: I actually composed the song that the father wrote to the IRS about not being able to pay his taxes. So, yeah, there’s a hit Broadway will never see.

Hope this isn’t too much of a hijack.

3

It’s not really a hijack at all.

As the OP, I officially open the thread up to the play you will never write, the symphony you will never compose, the study you will never write the grant proposal for, etc.

If you even want to post the one song you actually did write for the musical you will never compose, feel free.

4

I’m not very good at plot, most of my ideas are concepts that I think would be interesting (and are probably not original, but hard to do a search on to see).

For example, I wanted to tell the same story twice, from two different characters’ point of view. They largely don’t match at all, but at several points their paths cross (near the beginning, halfway through, and at the conclusion) and see those sequences from a very different angle.

5

Ooo, I like this. There’s an Audrey Tautou film that does this: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, and it’s a hoot (but not a comedy). I’m sure there’s plenty of space to do your own take.

I’ve always enjoyed good tales of reliving, like the novel Replay or the film Groundhog Day. For several years I’ve been working-purely in my head-a story where a character is reborn into the exact same family and time, repeatedly, but remembers all his previous lives. It’s probably been done, though.

6

A Private Investigator who suspects he might be psychic.

7

A huge internet company (think Google or Facebook) traces its success back to their first offering, a mapping app. Unfortunately, they discover that one of their first engineers stole the data on which the app was based. That data includes a copyright trap; a town of 5,000 people in the midwest which doesn’t actually exist. If the trap is discovered, the entire corporate empire could be brought down. They try to start luring people to the site so they can create the town without anyone noticing the ruse.

Side characters include a woman who runs black-ops for a state tourism board, and a Sotheby’s auctioneer who specializes in the umbilical cords of celebrities.

Satire ensues.

8

I’ve got an idea but I will write it when I fully retire so I can’t divulge.

9

Mine would be called “Return of the Colossi.” I got the idea from the part of the Arthurian legend which states that King Arthur will return in England’s greatest hour of need.

Since he hasn’t returned yet, obviously that time has not yet come. I got to thinking what that time might look like, and I settled on an SF-style alien invasion of Earth.

But wait! What if the threat is big enough to need multiple heroes? And so I envisioned a scenario in which 20-30 of the greatest leaders of the past, both political and military, would return to defeat the threat.

10

The screenplay I’ll never write is called “Analog.”
It’s about a political movement to shut down the Internet for good. (Yes, we just had a thread here on the SDMB positing that same end result!)
Of course, the movement slips out of control and gets more and more radicalized. And one politician proclaims: “Analog means analog!”

11

I spent a couple of years writing a novel about North Korea selling nuclear weapons to ISIS but the plot being disrupted by a Japanese intelligence officer. The man had been tipped off by a North Korean informant - the woman who was formerly his jailer when he had been abducted as a hostage and spent years in North Korea earlier, whom he’d falling in love with. Japan captured the nuke shipment and secretly kept the nukes to have a nuclear arsenal of its own. Meanwhile, a huge earthquake near Taiwan prompted China to invade Taiwan, seeing it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a move while Taiwan’s defenses were weakened, and the Kurds also decided to take advantage of a power vacuum in the Middle East to start annexing lots and lots of territory. An errant Chinese bomb also hit a Taiwanese pharmaceutical factory and forced a young Taiwanese couple to go on a blockade-run to South Korea to get antibiotics. Got to about 150 pages.

I gave up because of writer’s block and because it was just too far-fetched.

12

I started writing a novel about a teenage girl in a boarding school who is raped and the subsequent fallout of that incident. However, I hit some serious writer’s block about the same time I realized that as a middle-aged CIS man writing about a teenage girl suffering a sexual assault, it probably would come across to the average reader as a male rape fantasy. In fact, the genesis of the story was that I had a former student confide in me once long after she had left our school that while she was a student of our program she had been raped by another student while they both attend our school. Writing about it helped me deal with how helpless I felt and my guilt over not being able to help her while she was my student. Our own @Spice_Weasel read some of it a few years ago and encouraged me to continue writing, but my self-doubts are strong enough that I’m not sure I can finish it.

13

If you do complete this novel, it would be good to do so under a woman’s pen name.

14

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell does this. I read the four books 40 years ago so I had to confirm, from Wikipedia that “… the first three books present three perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during the Second World War.”

15

My idea may be more screenplay than a novel. It conjures some imagery of Doctor Zhivago, to my eye.

I’m the oldest of 5 siblings. The first 3 were born in the Philippines and the last 2 in the US. Both parents were born and raised in the Philippines. My mom is half Russian. This story is about her Russian father, who died before I could talk with him.

Her dad grew up in St. Petersburg and he lived and worked in Moscow for a time. He worked in the Kremlin for some time, based on conversations with my father where he described some of the underground passage tunnels. He had a family in Russia. Wife and kids.

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, in the October Revolution (“Red October”) he was on the wrong side and was jailed. He was transported to a prison in Siberia. Through family and friends he made some friends in the local town who would visit him. One of them became his ‘girlfriend’.

This girlfriend, on one visit she brought him some food. It was a fish she had cooked, and inside it she buried a long file. He started cutting through the window bars, and each week he could measure his progress. He figured that New Year’s Eve was coming in a few months and he figured to make his break then, when the guards were drunk with vodka.

He makes his break and jumps out the window and starts running away in the snowfields. When the guards started shooting he kept running, zig zags through the snow and winter. I’m sure he did not have a parka, but you do what you gotta do. Get busy living, or get busy dying, right?

He made his way on foot across Siberia and southeast into Manchuria, then south into China. All on foot, or with whoever would give him a ride. He eventually made his way to Shanghai. This is a distance of roughly 2,000 miles, from Siberia.

His plan was to come to the US. That was his goal. In Shanghai he got onto a cargo ship as part of the crew and it was headed to the US. The ship made a stop in Manila for a few days. Walking around Manila, he thought to himself that he’d found an island paradise. Especially after his winter exploits in Siberia. He decided to stay for a few more days and catch the next ship.

The next cargo ship came, and he was still liking it so much in Manila that he said he’d just catch the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat for ship after ship after ship.

He met my grandmother and they fell in love and got married. I have no idea if he told her about his family in Russia. My mom is still around, I should ask her.

They pump out two kids, my uncle and my mom. And they continue to live in the PI. My mom meets my dad, and they move to the US where they live and raise their kids. My grandfather never got to visit us in Upstate New York.

In 1968 when he died I was only 7 and I have faint memories of seeing my mom holding a letter and crying. I never knew my grandfather but he held me when I was a baby and toddler. I have vague memories of someone tickling my bare belly with his stubbly beard. My folks tell me that he liked to do that. That’s the only memory I have of him.

16

I think a wonderful historical film could be made from the rescue of the Danish Jews during WW2:

Rescue of the Danish Jews - Wikipedia

I’d be writing something up now and shopping it around now, if I had the slightest idea how to do so.

17

I also like the idea of a mystery set in Africa, with a Peace Corps volunteer as a main character.

18

A really good story, thanks. At one point the physicist Niels Bohr and actress Greta Garbo got involved with the effort.

19

Can’t wait…Retirement NOW!

.

But that’s okay. Christopher Moore’s been hacking your journal, so I’ll read his version while I’m waiting.

20

Maybe a female co-author?