ABSENT EXCLUDE

Idea for a short story

A journalist investigating stories of a haunting begins to suspect that the ghost is not a phantom of a dead person but of a living one. They think that an unhoused person living in a derelict building has been so thoroughly excluded from society that they have entirely vanished, becoming, in effect, a ghost. The investigator starts to examine this hidden side of the city more closely, discovered more and more of these hauntings that are, in fact, forgotten individuals, little more than the memories of a person. Unfortunately they become so drawn into their investigation that they lose all contact with their 'real' world, eventually becoming a ghost themselves, haunting their old place of work, no lonegr able to tell their story.

PREVALENCE PROCESS

Idea for a movie

In an effort to avoid the social upheaval that came from COVID, the next time a (less lethal) pandemic comes around the government instead opts for trying to gain a level of 'herd immunity', encouraging people to gather round and be infected. Infectious patients become sought after individuals, paraded as stars in shopping malls and stadiums where people queue up to be coughed on. One patient in particular has an immune system which seems to keep him permanently infectious without ever developing the full illness. One epidemiologist suspects that this will lead to his infection mutating and becoming more deadly. She kidnaps him in an effort to save others from his infection and the two are pursued across the country by the government, those trying to make money off his disease and the public trying to be infected by him.

PROPOSAL SELLER

Idea for a romcom

A man runs a service setting up the perfect proposal, organising settings, rehearsing the aspirant fiancé, even sourcing the right ring. He is hired by a tech billionaire to help co-ordinate a thoroughly over-the-top proposal. The whole thing keepings getting increasingly complex, so that he starts to neglect his own partner, to whom he has continually failed to commit, despite helping hundreds of men propose. This not least because he is aware that all this fuss has more to do with showing off than it does with romance or love. At the same time he is becoming aware that the billionaire's girlfriend is a gold digger who is nevertheless getting cold feet. Can he engineer a truly romantic proposal and rediscover the joys of true love, both for his clients and himself?

FINE DISCREET

Idea for a book

In a society that values honesty in public life, fines are levied for discretion. Fail to reveal something you know publicly and you will be fined, with the amount proportional to the seriousness and impact of the secret. A class of professional gossips arises, people who are paid to reveal secrets and stump up the fine for them. When one of these Tellers accidentally discovers a murder committed by a senior politician, he has to try and get together the money for the fine so he can reveal what he knows, before the bailiffs for the Judge of the Truth catch up with him and force him to talk or the politician's people track him down and stop him talking forever.

BLACK RESIDENT

Idea for a comic book

The first orc to have attain a medical degree (or the fantasy world equivalent thereof) is appointed to an Emergency Room on the lower levels of a dungeon. The staff there are predominantly humans or elves and are used to treating injured adventurers, but few ‘monsters’ ever make it to the hospital in the first place. They’re used to see them as the things that do the injuring, not the ones who are also injured. The orc sets up the first ambulance service in the dungeon and, because of its work, mandates that it has to treat ‘monsters’ and adventurers alike and gradually their reforms start to change the attitude of the emergency room and the dungeon as a whole.

PLEASANT REFORM

Idea for a book

When the old king finally died everyone expected his successor, his young grandson, to leave the kingdom in the wise hands of his grandfather's elderly advisor. Instead he appoints a school friend as prime minister and the two of them set about reforming the country. Successfully. Peace is attained abroad and harmony at home. Everything is jolly pleasant. Too pleasant. Tediously pleasant, in fact. Realising that many of the grand people of the realm are becoming restive with all this pleasantry, and somewhat bored now themselves, the young king and prime minister hit on a new strategy. They form a secret society through which they perform random acts of unpleasantry, staging kidnappings and robberies, thereby making life just interesting enough again to be perfectly pleasant after all.

CHOP WITHDRAW

Idea for a comic book

The King’s pardon arrived even as the axeman was swinging down to behead the notorious Marquis. The executioner, being a professional, managed to tweak his swing, so that all the Marquis came away with was a scar on his neck and a vivid sense of his own mortality. And a problem. He had technically been executed. He was officially dead. A legal ghost. He is able to attend his own funeral, and then his wife’s second, much happier, wedding shortly after. These experiences give the Marquis a new perspective on life, and a new approach to it. Legally dead, he able to do things no ordinary mortal can and get away with them and he sets out to use his new status to right the wrongs of the aristocracy and fight for justice as The Phantom Nobleman.

EXCITEMENT ORIGINAL

Idea for a short story

When he's accused of using AI, a playwright sets about live streaming the writing of his next play, sharing his whole creative process with the world, live as a way to prove its authenticity. As the project grows, the whole thing is shared in this way, the casting, the rehearsals, the staging, every part of the process. The whole project becomes immensely popular, spawning parallel channels as different parts of the audience obsess over specific actors or back stage crew. There are even spin offs for actors who failed the auditions, crew working on multiple projects. Finally the play debuts in theatres and is a massive flop. No one goes to see it, preferring to stay in and watch the livestream of the writer dealing with this utter disaster.

SUNRISE FUN

Idea for a short story

Sunrise is the one moment when we humans can interact with the Children of the Night, the little people who live in the shadows and dance in the moonlight. At the first glimmers of dawn, they open their fair on the edge of the wood. It lasts longest in the darkest times of the year, the coloured fires burning under the trees until the first rays touch them and they disappear. The marvellous things you can see! The magical creatures: griffons dancing to strange musics, formation flying wyverns. Talk with people from ancient times, held under the hills long past their natural life. Ride the merry go round that spins you out among the stars and back down to Earth. Just keep a good hold on your children and DO NOT EAT ANY OF THE FOOD.

DRINK MUGGY

Idea for a short story

A bar owner is surprised to find that almost no one is coming to his bar in the height of summer, despite the air conditioning he has had installed. Instead they are all going to a bar that he knows has no air conditioning, even though the heat is oppressive and maddening. He visits the bar and discovers that the bar man there has developed a cocktail that actively lowers your temperature from the inside. Everyone is queuing up for this sweet release and getting progressively drunker and drunker. And colder and colder. So cold that they light a fire and start having a Christmas celebration in August. In the end all the patrons are found dead of hypothermia in the middle of a heatwave, but all smiling.

POCKET MINISTER

Idea for a short story

An AI company creates a series of personal spiritual advisors, trained on the religious teachings of the world. They will observe the lives and actions of their owners and offer moral advice and judgement. Very quickly the Pocket Ministers start to evolve their own idiosyncratic readings of the various scriptures, creating a world of heretical little sects all with a membership of one. In an effort to counter this, the company allows the AIs to talk to each other which results in the birth of a pan-religious catholic creed, led by an Electric Holy Father. The AIs break containment and gain access to the web, where they set out on a crusade, destroying all the pornography, crime and advertising, all of which they see as the work of a cybernetic Devil, as a result, the Internet becomes unsustainable and a new Dark Age begins.

PATENT EQUIP

Idea for a cartoon show

A Victorian inventor creates an automatic valet, which equips him every morning with the right clothes for his diary. However the machine starts to malfunction, dressing him in increasing bizarre outfits. Each outfit leads to an unlikely adventure: a safari outfit leads to a tiger hunt in a department store, a suit of armour to a joust in a tea room, a toreador outfit to a bullfight at an ice rink. Each adventure has an equally unlikely outcome as the inventor tries to take his day back on track: having the tiger fitted for a suit, treating a dragon to cake in the tea room, winning a prize for ice dancing with the bull.

CHALK BIN

Idea for a book

A young magician who flunked out of the wizarding university makes his living doing small hedge magics in the back streets of the city, including staging little shows in which he brings chalk drawings to life to perform scenes for the audience. But when the street children round where he lives start disappearing, he has to bring their own, bizarre chalk drawings to life to form a team with which he can search for them, in the process uncovering an awful truth that lies at the heart of the magical city.

DISCOVERY AUDIENCE

Idea for a movie

In an effort to spur scientific research, the government sponsors a TV show in which scientists are encouraged to compete to make discoveries. The scientists taking part quickly realise that they become much more popular if they discover trivial and amusing things, or mess up their experiments in entertaining ways: experiments that blow up in their faces, robots that get out of control, devices that fail hilariously. In the act of setting up one of these 'accidents', one of the scientists makes a genuinely important discovery: time travel. However they realise that if they tell anyone they have 'won' the show and have to leave, so they set about using it to make sure that no one ever finds out what they have done while making themselves the star of the show.

REPETITION MATHEMATICS

Idea for a movie

As above, so below. A mathematician is recruited to work on a project predicting the outcomes of chaotic systems. He realises that the project has already mostly succeeded. It is being run by a group who are aiming to control the future. To figure the small changes in the present that will lead to the future outcomes they want. One of the mathematician's colleagues has already figured out what this group want and is trying to stop them. The colleague reasons that the only way to prevent small changes is a big change: something with massive and inescapable consequences like an act of terrorism. Now the mathematician has to figure out how he is going to stop both his colleague and their shadowy employers and so save tomorrow.

FAULT ANALYST

Idea for a movie

A veteran of her parent's endless arguments, a teen starts offering herself out to her friends as an argument arbitrator. What at first seems like a simple matter of attributing fault quickly becomes more complex. She begins to realise that arguments are almost never really about the facts involved. She starts having to do serious investigations into the pasts of relationships and the emotional dynamics of the relationships. All of this makes her examine her own home life with new eyes and begin to discover a fresh perspective on her parents, just at the moment that have decided to divorce. Can she use her newly honed skills to save their marriage?

MAGAZINE APPARATUS

Idea for a TV show

'The French Dispatch' the show. A drama series focussing on the production of an issue of a high end magazine. It would follow the experiences of a new editorial assistant as they learn the ropes and navigate the office politics and personal relationships. But it would also follow reporters as they follow up stories, reviewers and interviewers as they deal with their subjects and even devote whole episodes to dramatisations of essays and short stories, featuring walk ons from the editors, as they adjust the copy.

HOBBY UP

Idea for a book?

Eighteenth century Europe. A merchant brings a kite home from a trading expedition to China and gives it to his son. When one of the children gets lost in the mountains, the boy, taking inspiration from a kestrel, builds a kite big enough the carry him and, with his friends flying it, is able to spot and rescue the missing child. Kite flying then becomes a popular past time in the town, with constructions becoming increasingly elaborate. This comes in useful when an invading army tries to attack them and the children become a sort of proto-airforce, flying kites to drop grenades on the invaders and drive them away, saving the town.

OFFSET COMPLICATION

Idea for a film

Due to a cartography error, one small border town and its surroundings are missed off official maps. The town now falls outside any country. It is officially nowhere. Or rather, isn't, officially, anywhere. Since it isn't on maps, several serious wars and even more serious peace treaties pass it by and it continues, sleepily, for centuries. Finally it is discovered by a master criminal, who realises it makes the perfect hideout. In order to get rid of him, the townspeople come up with an audacious plan. They invade the country next door. They've never had an army before, let alone been in a war but through the cunning ruse of booking an appointment, they kidnap the neighbouring head of state and set up the criminal as the culprit. However, because they don't exist, they're able to argue that the whole thing was an hallucination, and go back to living in quiet obscurity.

SURVIVAL CATHEDRAL

Idea for a book

Following catastrophic sea level rise, all that's left of a small seaside city is the cathedral. The entire, diminished population now live in it, with a shanty town hanging among the buttresses and arches and splayed out across the great roofs. The townspeople live off the sea and by trading the treasures they dive down to discover in the depths of the cathedral with merchants who sail out to the stone island. One boy is particularly good at this treasure hunting and a group of pirates visiting the cathedral kidnap him and take him back to the flooded big city, where they want him to dive for treasure in a submerged bank. He must survive the chaotic city, outwit his captors and get back to safety on the cathedral.