Free Idea Zero Dollar Store
I have too many ideas; please take one.
Welcome to the Free Idea Zero Dollar Store. I’ll share ideas for novels, shorts, and articles I’ll probably never write. BUT YOU COULD WRITE THEM!
As a novelist and multipotentialite with a neurodivergent mind, my brain generates 800,000 ideas a year, or something like that (probably actually far less, but let’s exaggerate for effect.) When it comes to new ideas, I’m an ever-growing web of mycelium. There must be some career where this would be advantageous, but I’ve yet to discover it.
I generate so many ideas that it kind of drives me crazy, so I usually jot them on Trello cards and ignore them forever. Others bang around in my folonpo1 for so long that I eventually write them as short stories. I used to put them on notecards and stuff them into a folder called “Someday Ideas.” But then the folder got too full and became a FULLDER.
See, I can’t stop.
With a current backlog of 65 short stories I’ve written but haven’t edited, I don’t think it’s wise to write more.
So, I want to shed some of my excesses this week and give my ideas to you in case you want them. Gift and thrift is the mental mood.
I must devote my novelly focus to editing my current work-in-progress, Acid Christmas, a dystopian holiday tale with disturbing snow.
So, I release this week’s ideas into the wild.
Feel free to take one and stab it with your pen.
Entire Novel Ideas:
Idea One: Techno Worms
Premise:
Brad Bingo is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur. In secret, one of his company’s teams develops sophisticated, microscopic, programmable machine worms. These worms can enter your bloodstream undetected and make you want things. They can make you desire whatever the company wants you to desire.
Brad, ever-lusting for more money to fund his speculative ideas and innovations, calls together a clandestine conference of other wealthy people and the henchmen of nation-states to discuss how the worms might benefit society. But who can be trusted with the powers of mass mind control? Will the worms go to the highest bidder? And what if the worms leak…
Sample Beginning:
The worms had become like God to him, squirming in his every third, maybe second thought, on the treadmill, in the backseat of his limousine, circulating while he made love to Evaline. Sometimes Brad wondered if they’d already entered him, swum into his bloodstream, and instructed him on how to make them… how to spread them like dandelion seeds…
Idea Two: The One Who Got Away
Premise:
On Instagram, her life looks great, a husband and two kids, enough money to pay for everything, but podiatrist Jane Drake has a problem, an obsession, one could say. She’s gotten everything she’s ever wanted, except for him… His name is Wes. They dated in college, even lived together; then he left her for a Russian tennis player. Now, at 45, Jane can’t stop thinking about him. Though it feels wrong, she finds his family on social media and studies them.
When she discovers that Wes has inherited a beach house on the Outerbanks, she buys a vacation home a few doors down. But how long will it take for Wes to see her and what will he say? What will her own husband do if he learns the truth? What has she done and why? Will she get away with this?
Sample Beginning:
It’s not always fun to feel crazy, but sometimes I enjoy it. Sometimes, it feels good to come totally unglued, like biscuits pulling away from the pan, like stepping onto the street of a new city, a vacation from reality. I need that, I tell myself, because I have too much responsibility. I deserve this treat. I hold on to this idea of my deserving as I watch Wes through sunglasses-covered eyes, peeking over a North Carolina sand dune. He’s playing beach ball keep-away with his two beautiful half-Russian kids, a boy, and a girl, blonds with ice-blue eyes like his. He doesn’t know I’m watching them. He maybe can never know. Yet how I want to completely pull away from that pan, to have him between my lips, to even just wave at him.
Short Story Ideas:
Deuter Pill:
I run into a guy I knew from high school, Deuter. He’s lost a ton of weight and I’m chunky as a rump roast, so I’m very impressed. “What did you do?” I ask.
Deuter says it’s these amazing new diet pills. He gives me one to try. I think, maybe I should figure out what’s in here first? But I eat it anyway.
The diet pill expands in my mouth. It’s like the foam you squirt inside a house to fill the cracks. I can’t get it out. No one can. The diet pill suffocates me to death.
Essay/Substack/Short Ideas:
Authorverse: What would a perfect metaverse for authors look like? Let’s imagine it.
Let’s call everything a farm, that will make it better. Troll farms, influencer farms, Yeezy shoe farms.
Cancel Moses and please tell Kanye.
Wattpad or Badpad: How Wattpad Exploits User-Generated Content
That’s all for this week!
And actually, I had an idea for an entire third novel, about an old racist white guy who is mad about changes to his neighborhood so he starts murdering the homeless with fentanyl—a Stephen King sort of thriller/mystery/dark book where the hero is a recovery worker at a rehab who unravels the plot, but this is getting long.
If you run with one of these ideas, let me know! I’ll take a mention in the special thanks section of your future novel.
What ideas did you have this week? How do you mine/harvest/farm your many ideas?
Guess maybe I should have called this post an “Idea Farm.”
Or write your own beginning for one of these ideas and share it here in the comments. Do these ideas remind you of any books you’ve already read? Or movies you’ve seen?
And if you liked this… I’ve got completed books you can read! Check out my first one: Cactus Friends: A Psychedelic Love Story
*Folonpo is a spoken word/slang I learned when I lived in Uganda that references a coconut, but is used to describe an unusually large forehead or dense, metaphorically thick brain.
Haha thank you! I should maybe charge as it people don’t value free things. But the universe gives freely and I like to have fun.