Story Seeds

Standard

1) Title: THE ELF-SKIN SHIELD

2) Classically, zombies won’t die except through violent head trauma but their bodies still rot. What if the zombie urge to devour flesh survived the dissolution of the flesh? What if it survived being devoured by scavengers, or worms, or being used as fertilizer. The entire biome would be taken over by the desire to consume all flesh. Oh, wait…

3) Ash Ketchum is… The Punisher! What about a Dark Age Of Comics version of Ash Ketchum, the incredibly talented and optimistic Pokemon trainer, in which terrible personal tragedy turns him–and his pocket monsters–into remorseless vigilantes.

4) A young woman shaves her head and discovers a pirates’ treasure map tattooed to her scalp. — This is the joke movie pitch I entered into a screenplay contest on Twitter. Not only did it advance (while “After a toddler loses a pinkie to a splinter, a vengeful father declares war on unsanded wood” inexplicably did not) but I received a script request from a small but legit company for it.

5) This one is inspired by the old Neverwinter Nights game: what if, every time you looked at someone, the universe/the gods/whoever let you know whether you will have to kill them or not? When I mouse over NPCs in NWN, a little dagger appears over the people I’ll have to fight, and a talking-face icon over the friendlies. But what if that happened in real life?

6) Lord of the Rings as it would have been written by [Author X] (Richard Stark, V.C. Andrews, John Cheever, etc)

7) Why should vampires only subsist on human blood? What about the blood of angels? I’d think that angel blood would sustain the undead for quite a long time, but hunting them would be quite a challenge.