What to Write, 2008 Edition

Welcome to this year’s annual installation of “What should I write for Nano?”

Last year I mostly finished To Kill a Goddess, in which a ne’er-do-well is blackmailed into killing his own mother — where the blackmailer is Ares, and the mother is Eris, and the ne’er-do-well is from Las Vegas. Genies, vampires, dragons, leprechauns — and it’s not a comedy.

This year, well, I don’t have as solid a plan as I did when I decided on that plotline.

There’s a meeting tomorrow about “plots,” so I figured I should try to have a few figured out. Fortunately, over the past year I kept notes as I thought up new storylines. They vary wildly in quality, creativity, and even coherence. Hence, unordered list! Titles are, of course, NOT final.

• Step 30: Profit – A heist crew rips off the Big Easy on their Big Night — in the confusion right after Mardi Gras, there are still some sober people on Bourbon Street. They’re still up to no good.
• Placement Exam – Gronman’s Academy of the Arts has their own flavor of distinguished alumni: Allan Quatermain, Harold “Arkansas” Smith, Richard “Dick” O’Donal, and Lauren Traft. Jim Taylor had never heard of them, either. College course entries for illegal arms purchasing, improvised combat, illicit entry, and export restriction avoidance are a fair bit less common.
• Postcards from Somewhere Else – A confidence man ends up employed as a remote viewer by the CIA during the height of the Cold War.
• Long Gone – A police officer working cold case files discovers that a random group of his missing person cases had all occurred on the same day… and people had disappeared around the world on the same day, at the same time. Had the Rapture happened, and nobody noticed?
• Heavy Justice – A super-powered detective goes after super-powered criminals.
• Must Have Phone – A researcher accidentally discovers that cell phones are deliberately stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers, causing addictive behavior. The researcher has to go on the run as corporations and the government alike try to cover up the story.
• Green Death – Crusading to save the environment is a noble task… but it doesn’t pay the bills. Assassinations, however, do. Main Character’s life is happily balanced between his life and his work, until he takes the wrong assignment. Now his fellow greenies are mad after Main accidentally takes out a whistleblower for the oil industry, and they’re gunning for him.
• Beautiful From Afar – A series of journal entries detailing the final days of the crew of the International Space Station after humanity is destroyed in a terrible calamity.

I have notes on I think at least one other upstairs. I’ll add it later. This is just the set I’ll take with me today.

EDIT: 10/11/2008, 11:17am: Added Green Death.
EDIT: 10/11/2008, 11:22am: Added Beautiful From Afar.