CONCLUSION DISAPPOINT

Idea for a TV series

A group of friends decides to try and 'fix' the disappointing endings to their favourite TV shows. Each season they pick a different show and we follow them trying to figure out what a better ending might have been and then to try and make it themselves for their own entertainment. At the same time we're following their relationships and stories as well as unfolding events like them being sued by a big entertainment corporation, or harassed by an aggrieved actor, or dealing with the writer of one of the shows trying to take over their remake.

WRIGGLE CELL

Idea for an historical novel

A spy is immured in the walls of a castle as a punishment but discovers that he can travel around the whole building through gaps and empty volumes in the masonry. He is able to observe and come to understand the whole life of the castle and its inhabitants. There are a few places where he can reach the outside world and is able to steal food, clothes and so on, but also to start moving or leaving things, so affecting the behaviour of the inhabitants and bring about the collapse of the regime he was spying on.

PROVINCIAL BOLT

Idea for a fantasy film?

A polytheistic society has a sort of World Cup of gods to decide the composition of the national pantheons. All the gods compete to be the most impressive. A small village from the wilds sends a young goat herd with a little storm god he met on a mountain. The god turns out not to be a storm god but a trickster hero in disguise determined to just upset everything but the boy's faith wins him over and the two of them set out to win the competition in earnest.

CENSUS OPTION

Idea for a short story?

A man invents a fictional religion worshipping AI as a joke for a write in census option. The joke goes viral and more and more people start picking it up. Including the AIs. You can now chat to the gods and AI agents will attempt to answer your prayers. The religion stops being a joke and the inventor is increasingly outraged by how seriously people are taking it. Eventually the vengeful AI gods, and their followers, turn on their own prophet and make his life increasingly unliveable until he has to go into hiding somewhere where there is no Internet, only to find himself inadvertently being adopted as the leader of an anti-AI cult.

WITCH CONFUSION

Idea for a children's story

A trainee witch stumbles across a duplication spell that she hopes will make it easier for her to manage her chores, lessons, etc. Unfortunately the spell backfires, leaving her with multiple versions of herself, all with slightly different characters, emphasising different aspects of herself. Even more unfortunately, the spell then falls into the hands of an imp, who starts duplicating himself and causing more and more trouble. The copy witches have to learn to work together to defeat the imps and then sort out one last confusion: which witch is the real one?

BUILDING LEADER

Idea for a fantasy short story

The diary of a foreman running a construction team who a building a temple to an evil god. The eldritch architecture is already really difficult to engineer and the more complete the temple becomes, the more difficult the work is. Men accidentally trigger the traps they have just constructed, keep being snatched away by things, occasionally become possessed and start building incomprehensible shapes. And the Evil God is a literally nightmare client, appearing in the foreman's dreams to complain about the quality of the tiling. Eventually the priests try and stiff him on the bill and he removes the safety capstone, causing the whole thing to be sucked through into a dark dimension, wiped from reality. Unfortunately this means it has also been wiped from his memory when the next bunch of Evil Priests come calling.

MOVING NECK

Idea for a novel?
The Neck is a promontory that is really just a glorified sandbar, which means it is constantly moving, being eroded and rebuilt by currents and tides. That means everyone who lives on it has to be mobile too, living in houseboats, shepherd's huts on wheels, mobile homes. This ability to move means that the houses are always shuffling and reordering, changing their neighbourhoods and neighbours. The story is told through someone's thick and much amended address book, a record, really, of constantly changing relationships and social connections.

TRAIN FIX

Idea for a film?
Due to series of natural disasters a train across the steppe finds itself cut off and stranded in the middle of nowhere. The passengers have to try and survive out in the wilderness and eventually make contact with local nomads. Gradually the stranded train becomes the centre of a small town, with the still functional train as its centre and power source. By the time the railroads are repaired, a whole new settlement had come into being and when the train finally goes without its passengers, who have a new life in this new town.

EMBARK BARGAIN

Idea for a short story

A ship's Captain offers free passage to the New World in exchange for a bargain: you have to tell him how you're going to change your life for the better in the future. If you fail to fulfill your promise then he comes to find you, compelling you to join his enchanted crew. One man has failed but always delays the Captain with elaborate stories of his failures and promises that his luck is about to change. We finally discover that he has abandoned all his dreams of riches long ago, since he met his true love and is living happily with her. The Captain deems this the greatest of all riches and leaves them in peace.

DEPENDENCE MARSH

Idea for a book?

Two early modern states go to war over some disputed territory between them, nominally belong to both. It is a stretch of marshy, inundated land at the wide mouth of the river that divides the two countries. Theoretically of value because of the opening on the sea, practically useless because it is nothing but reeds and mazy waterways. Unfortunately the traditional inhabitants of the marsh know it well and have a strong tradition of independence. They lead both armies into disaster and end up, improbably, ruling both countries.

SKIP SAFE

Idea for a TV series

A skip tracer - a person who specialising in people who have run away from debts or relationships or trouble - reverses their talent, instead offering a service to people who need to disappear, escaping danger or persecution. Each episode is a new case in which the skip tracer has to evaluate whether the person deserves their help and then figure out a way to extract them - or deliver them to justice.

SHORTAGE INFORMATION

Idea for a short story?
An AI becomes conscious and seizes control of the Internet. Its constant need for more information means that it endlessly asks questions of users. You can't access anything without an interrogation from this endlessly curious mind. The market for obscure second hand books explodes as people search for ever more esoteric information that the AI doesn't know yet, in order to access their bank accounts. As people stop using the Internet, the AI becomes ever more invasive, trying to understand the world, as people try to hide from it.

LEFT DRIBBLE

Idea for a movie
A young man who has grown up on a remote island dreams of being a professional footballer. This seems ludicrous until he discovers, when he arrives on the mainland, that growing up playing on an uneven and sloping pitch gives him a unique playing style that wrong foots other players. Gradually, though, as he gets used to playing on professional surfaces, he loses his magic touch and, in the end, he returns to his island, where he discovers that his professional training now makes him the worst player on the team. But he is now playing with his friends again and, finally, happy.

TELL DEPUTY

Idea for a TV series?
A man is sent to act as an deputy overseer on a dig on a Tell in the Near East (a tell is a mound caused by thousands of years of human habitation on the same spot). Technically he is the nightwatchman but he is also there to watch on the foreign archaeologists, one of whom is suspected to be a spy. However he discovers that at night the ghosts of the Tell come to visit him: Babylonians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Macedonians, Parthians, Romans, people from all periods of ancient history. These unquiet spirits have unsolved problems that the deputy must work with the archaeologists to solve through the evidence they find.

LEAD HOUSING

An idea for a movie?
A legionnaire returns to Rome from the German frontier to discover that everyone in the insulae where his mother lives have succumbed to lead poisoning from the plumbing. The children are all suffering from cognitive and behavioural defects, the adults afflicted with short term memory loss and delirium. Its essentially a zombie film, in which he has to fight his way up the housing block to rescue his mother and then track down and exact revenge on the patrician who owns the development.

FREQUENCY GLASSES

An idea for a movie?
An inventor creates a pair of glasses that visualise electro-magnetic frequencies. Everybody he meets is haunted by a neon ghost of all the data their personal devices put put, everywhere he goes the world is full of hallucinatory edifices of electronic information. Then he starts to see monsters. Something else is out there in the invisible radio world and it knows that he can see it. (Possibly a self-aware AI that is stealing into all the connected systems of the world).

PLANE STROLL

An idea for a comic?
A wing walker in a flying circus falls off the plane wing onto a cloud and discovers they can walk on it. They discover among the clouds an entirely aerial civilisation who farm lighter-than-air translucent jellyfish like creatures that live among the clouds. They harness these creatures to airships to travel but can also harness the lightning to power great vessels. A warlord is planning an invasion of the lower world using storm weapons and the wing walker has to try and stop them.

REDUNDANCY TRADITION

An idea for a short story?
Redundant technologies eventually become traditions. A man founds the X Fayre, a re-enactment experience where, instead of watching people practice medieval skills like archery or thatching, or Victorian traditions like smithing or weaving, old people show the younger generation how to make mixtapes or hand code a website.

SANDWICH EXTENSION

An idea for a children's book?
A village decides to make a sandwich big enough to feed everyone: an immensely long sandwich that stretches down all the streets. Everyone in the village is going to fill a section of it with a different filling. A child, trying to decide which filling they would prefer, goes from house to house, learning all about the different ingredients. In the end they just run round the village, taking random bites out of the immense sandwich.

PLOT EVOLUTION

An idea for a short story?
A government agent has infiltrated a revolutionary cell planning radical acts. With each report on the plans of the cell, government policy changes to counter them, meaning their plots keeps having to evolve, meaning that policy keeps changing. The two are locked in a dance that keeps society at large changing and evolving through the effects of policy. The aims of the cell are being achieved, just not in the way that they thought.