A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What’s your story’s premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.
Sci fi set in contemporary times on Earth. A spaceship from another dimension accidentally enters a freak wormhole and gets dumped off in our universe. Only a single human survived on the ship, augmented by some super fancy AI (that actually works reliably unlike what we have access to nowadays). Captain isn’t able to maintain orbit but is able to land out in the middle of the south Pacific. Captain & AI have no way to return to their home universe or even send a message.
Ship contains a lot of advanced technology. Captain knows the theory of it all but doesn’t know the details. Ship’s AI has schematics for everything on board but not for everything in the civilization they left - only the most commonly used parts.
Ship contains a perfectly efficient recycler and replicator, but it’s limited by speed and by internal volume of the replicator.
Ship has a medbay capable of treating any known disease or injury, but there are only four pods (normal crew size only needs four), and treating something severe like a heart attack or cancer requires a full week non-stop.
Ship isn’t designed for combat or passenger service, but is instead a giant mining ship equipped with tractor beams to facilitate harvesting ore in space. It’s about the size of a giant ore carrier from Earth, and does have some rudimentary point defense weapons to defend against space pirates.
Ship has some problems that make it temporarily not-spaceworthy, and may or may not be able to find all the raw materials it needs to repair itself for more spaceflight. It is however perfectly capable of atmospheric flight operations.
How does the captain interact with us? Is the ship able to find enough stuff to repair itself? Does the captain decide to trade favors for supplies that can’t be synthesized? Or does the captain spiral into a pit of despair at being irrevocably separated from their home?
In case you’re wondering, yes I do as a matter of fact enjoy tech uplift stories.
Does the captain decide to trade favors for supplies that can’t be synthesized?
…how sexy is this captain?
Pssh, how sexy is the ship?
That’s the hard part. If I had that, I’d be writing.
If you give me a genre, I’ll give you a premise
A doppelganger of sorts replaces a character, but it’s entirely for the better. Despite being an unearthly monstrosity, it’s well meaning, good intentioned and has everyone’s best in mind. Unfortunately this isn’t seen as a good thing by the crowd the original ran with, and those who find out are at a crux between liking the person and fearing the monster.
Rough outline, a woman loses her husband to violence and takes their young son to a more rural community to get away from the urban environment which has too many ghosts and memories.
Partial inspiration:
She settles into the small town, in an old house that needs work, but she needs the work to put her mind on other things. Lots of quirky locals offer advice, want all up in her business, and she’s polite but shuts them down.
Working on the house, a large, ropy, brown tail dangles from a tree branch outside the window and she’s startled to see a full grown-ass cougar just hanging out. Apparently it liked the place when it was abandoned and sees no need to move on.
She doesn’t know what to do, and throws a home made cheese ball at it, a welcome gift from one of the quirky locals. She didn’t really want the thing, or know what to do with it. The cat bats it out of the air and carries it off.
So now, she didn’t really want to talk to the locals, but has to. She wants to build a fence to keep the cat out.
She has part of it in place, and the cat leaps over it without any trouble at all. The fence wasn’t complete, it could have gone around the fence, it jumped it because it could.
Then, the town erupts. A big cat has been killing livestock at nearby farms, everyone is up in arms and they blame her for moving into the old abandoned house and “stirring up trouble.”
Locals go on a literal torch weilding mob rampage to kill the cat causing all the damage, and they kill one, so everyone thinks the problem is resolved.
But the color on this one isn’t quite… right, is it? And it’s bigger, a male, she’s certain the one by her house was female.
She gets home, pretty much revolted by the mob action, and finds an impossibly small cougar cub, asleep on her porch.
That’s an incredible outline! Got a working title? Maybe “Out of the Bag” or something?
I like the idea that you start with “quirky” locals who are presumably likeable and the main character is probably a bit off putting at first but then later the mob mentality comes out and your sympathies are reversed.
“Ghost Cat”. It’s another name for mountain lion.
Reminds me of this haunting/terrifying song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OELFgreDw5M&pp=ygUgUGluZSBoaWxsIGhhaW50cyBvbGQgd2hpdGUgdGhhbmc%3D
You told it well here, I enjoyed this story.
You might really enjoy the short story ‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ by Kij Johnson.
A reverse Three little pigs. Where the pigs (cops) are the bad guys, and the wolf is just a pot head
I’d write a sci-fi story, which explains the fermi paradox. There are thousands of alien races all over the galaxy, but they basically all took one look at humankind and said “fucking hell no, those guys are absolute dicks”.
I’ve got a similar story that I’ve been workshopping for years…the alien races decide humans are too warlike, and after our first space war (against other humans, with us not knowing aliens exist yet) the alien council ruling the galaxy decides we’re too dangerous and getting too technologically advanced, so they send an AI to try to wipe us out. Galactic civilization has been largely peaceful for tens of thousands of years so they don’t know how to do war, but they program an ai to try to eliminate humanity while preserving the rest of life on Earth.
They mostly succeed, but in the conflict the earth does get devastated despite the best efforts of the AI. A human colony ship escapes, and hundreds of years later the descendants of the massacre return to wreak bloody vengeance on the rest of the galaxy.
I have a setting and characters but no story. And I have stuff that could be part of a story, but I don’t know how to put it together. Like an arranged marriage, and jealousy between someone born to power and someone who fought to earn it. I just don’t know how to make a story that fits all of them in there.
I couldn’t really think of anything other than an autobiography, or ANOTHER science fiction story set in space (with fish and Toki Pona this time around, and four girls as the protagonists). Actually, I prefer that last thing to be an animated cartoon than a novel.
