Story Ideas

Below are 8 ideas for stories I'm going to be working on in the coming year. The only problem? I don't know where to start. If you have time, read the following descriptions then @ reply me on twitter (@eruanna317) with the one you think i should start with. Thanks!

Fairy Godmother

The day after her “golden birthday,” a teen girl discovers she’s a Fairy Godmother. With the help of the mentor assigned to her, she comes to grips with the changes, duties, and challenges this brings. However, when the spike of magical activity in her small hometown attracts some unsavory immortals, our heroine must figure out how to save everyone else’s Happily Ever After while trying to find her own.

Orinda and the Dragon

In a kingdom where dragons were long thought to have been extinct, one suddenly appears, stealing cattle and razing villages. When a foolish friend gets it into her head that she can become royalty by getting herself captured by a dragon (and hopefully rescued by a prince), our heroine Orinda rushes off to save her. In the rescue process, Orinda kills the dragon – and wakes up the next morning the victim of the dragon’s curse: the one who slays the dragon shall become the dragon. While fending off pesky knights and trying to resist her newfound dragon nature, Orinda seeks to reverse the curse…and in doing so uncovers a nefarious plot to overthrow the kingdom.

Ghost

The story of an old woman who has recently lost her husband and has also recently lost her eyesight. She’s now quite blind. She moves in with her son and his wife, but has trouble sleeping at night because she can tell someone is in the room with her but is refusing to let on that they’re there. Her son and daughter think she’s crazy, but the woman becomes convinced that what she’s feeling is the ghost of her dead husband coming to visit her. She befriends a faux-gypsy quack who convinces the old woman that she can “reanimate” the ghost. When a local man dies in a fishing boat accident, they plot to steal his body and try to bring the woman’s husband’s spirit back into physical form. Is it a hoax? Will they get caught? And if it somehow works, there’s always this thought: what if the ghost they reanimate isn’t the old woman’s husband at all, but someone – or something—else entirely???

Fountain

An archaeological researcher and his team stumble across an underground chamber that appears to have been sealed for thousands of years. Within this chamber is a fountain, and at the bottom of the fountain is what appears to be the body of a woman, perfectly preserved in its salty waters. When they bring the woman’s body to the surface, suddenly she coughs and sputters – she’s alive. How could a live woman be inside this chamber whose only entrance has been sealed off for thousands of years? She claims she was enchanted by a powerful wizard to sleep ten thousand years in a fountain watered by the tears of men. The logical, sane part in his head tells him she’s lying, or more likely crazy, but the more he gets to know this sad, lovely girl, the more he begins to secretly wonder if her story could somehow be true…

Dying Fairy at the Lake House

(Not fully fleshed out yet.) A young couple goes to a remote lake house for one of their first trips alone together. When the plumbing goes out in the cabin, the boyfriend drives into town to report it, which leaves the girlfriend all alone and without any form of transportation when a strange creature, badly injured and probably dying, arrives on her doorstep and essentially takes her hostage. The events of the next hour are explosive, as our heroine grapples with her worst fears and is forced to rewrite her very understanding of the universe. Will they both survive to see the end of the tale?

Girl With a World In Her Hands

A boy at an exclusive boarding school meets the headmaster’s reclusive niece when in the process of sucking up to her uncle at a dinner soiree. He befriends the strange girl, who is very thin and pale and obviously suffering some sort of debilitating disease that no one wants to talk about. Unused to such attentions, especially from someone her own age, she confides in him more than she should and reveals the secret behind her illness. She cups her hands together, palms and fingertips each touching the other hand’s to form a ring, and when he looks through instead of the patch of gray wall that should show through on the other side, he finds himself looking through into a strange sort of garden, with unfamiliar flora and fauna. It seems this girl is a portal to another world! Anytime any part of her bare skin touches another part of her body and forms a ring, it opens a space between our world and this other place. But whenever someone tries to put something through into that world or take something from it, the exertion required to accomplish such a feat takes a staggering physical toll on her. The reason she is so sick is because her uncle has been performing experiments to try to ascertain the nature of this other world. And like her uncle, our hero soon finds himself obsessed with that place, and constantly wondering where it is and what it would be like to go there. Our hero must decide—does he love this girl enough as a person to want to rescue her from this life of physical torment, or will his obsession with this unexplored world lead him to an act that could bring about irreparable harm or even death?

Sarah Normal

A young girl moves into a house that is, essentially, alive. The house is old and unhappy, and it’s hiding something. The girl is young and full of life and teeming with curiosity. In her quest to discover the secrets of the house, she lets loose something quite terrible upon all who enter into it. She soon discovers that when you play with monsters, you may well stumble to your doom.

The Pictures on the Wall

When the car breaks down on a deserted country road near dusk, a mother and daughter start walking to (a) either find a spot with better cell phone coverage, or (b) spot a house that might let them use a phone to call a tow truck. They spot the house first, a cute two-story with its lights on at the top of a hill. But there are no cars in the driveway and when they knock, the door slides open of its own accord—no one is there to greet them. The first thing the daughter notices on looking around is the pristine white squares on the otherwise yellowed walls… someone has taken down all the pictures that had been hanging there, it seems. A sudden noise from upstairs alarms them, but it turns out to be a teenage boy who’s been squatting in the house for about a week. He was the one to take the pictures down. Why? “Because they kept—changing.” He takes them upstairs and pulls down a dusty, weathered black and white photo from where he’d hidden it on a closet shelf. He wipes clean the glass and shows them: it’s a picture of a woman and girl walking up a hill. He grabs another. The woman stepping into the house, the daughter close on her heels. Another: the woman and daughter catch sight of a teenage boy… “That’s us,” says the daughter. “Yes,” says the teenage boy. But what happens if the pictures catch up with reality?