My heart thing is still stopping me from working on any of my original projects (had a massive flare-up due to writing out the idea for a no-pressure, not-jam-related game!) so I don't have much to talk about in my own writing life right now, so I guess I'll be answering the monthly question instead. (Though I will be seeing my doctor again next week, and I'm hopeful that my friend was right and menopause might be playing a role in it. That would both give a direction for treatment and guarantee that the problem would eventually go away on its own. Also it would mean not dealing with being tested for sleep apnea.)
Anyway!
July 5 question - 99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?
Most of my story ideas come from things I encounter in my daily life...though that includes things I "encounter" by reading about them, seeing them on TV, etc. Sometimes that's a pretty straightforward process (I do end up writing a lot of fanfiction, after all, so there's a lot of "what if the hero's parents didn't die?" or "what if the characters from this show met the ones from that movie?" type of things), while sometimes it's also more of a train of thought bouncing around off of something I've seen until it's something new.
I'm trying to remember a good example, but...that's the sort of thing that--oh, no, I have one!
So, there's this game called Persona 5 Strikers in English. (Its Japanese title is slightly less stupid, maybe, if you squint.) The plot of the game is way too much to explain, but it involves a group of teenagers (and one cop after a while) literally entering someone's mental landscape to find out why it's gone screwy and to alter it so that they'll stop doing terrible, slightly supernatural things to others. (Not a very good description of the story, but...) In one case, they've entered the mind of a guy who wrote a really awful, exceedingly generic fantasy novel, which has become a massive bestseller because he's essentially magically brainwashed thousands of readers. In order to defeat his mental image of himself (it almost makes sense in context) they have to get into the Demon Lord's castle from his novel. The only one of them who actually read the novel explains that if it works the same way as the castle in the novel, then they'll have to go to all these other places and do these other things to open the way in. One of the others in the party asks why the Demon Lord wouldn't just have a door that can't open so the hero trying to kill him can't get in.
My immediate response to that character was "well, he must be into the hero, obviously!"
That, uh, was not the explanation in the game. But it set my mind in motion with "what would that be like, if the demon lord allowed the hero out to get him into his castle because he wanted to bang said hero?"
That led me to write a rather questionable visual novel wherein the player is the Demon Lord who decides that the Hero looking to kill him is very handsome and totally his type, so he allows him into his castle and revives him every time he gets killed by the assorted minions so that eventually the Hero will fight his way up to the top floor of the castle and the Demon Lord can have his way with him. 😅
This, um, is not typical of my writing. But it was fun to write something so different from my usual fare.
And more importantly, hopefully that illustrated the way I derived a more-or-less original story idea from something else.
(Not gonna share the link to the game, 'cause it's exceedingly embarrassing, as it's technically NSFW because the descriptions of some of the hero's many deaths are fairly sexualized. 😰 I was so embarrassed by it that it took me three days to post it after I finished the game. (Humiliatingly, it's by far the most popular thing I've posted to my itch.io account.))
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