I have several ideas for stories which involve musicians or music scenes, and thought maybe I could do the same thing I did with my dark fantasy stories and mash em up into one very complicated story.  Did I share anything from that effort?  Don’t think I did.  Anyway, none of my other places for conceptual work are appealing to me at the moment (discord, sketchbooks, google docs), so I’m gonna do this live.

Side note, I’ve heard concepting used in this context before often enough, but caught myself wondering “why not conceiving?”  Seems like it’s jargon shared by businesses and creative fields, more like brainstorming concepts to develop an idea, as distinct from conception/conceiving when you get the idea in the first place?  Good enough.

Spoiler Alert:  If anything comes of this idea or the ideas that it is comprised of, well, you might lose some enjoyment from revelations necessary to my thought process below.  Or maybe you’ll forget anything you read by the time it comes available.

__Elements

• Electropocalypse:  A novel (my husband finished a first draft, languishing in the first draft pile) that I’d like to use for its setting.  Alternate version of the real world, but with all government and business being more extreme and cutthroat.  Pushes the limits of “double mumbo jumbo” by including janky cybernetics inspired by old IBM and Videodrome, alongside psychic powers and demon summoning.
• Keep Austin Weird:  One of my Spooktober ideas, about a gay Romeo and Juliet whose respective “families” are music/drug cliques.
• Danny Elfman and Beck:  Two musicians who are genuinely creative and artistic, but whose careers were no doubt helped a lot by connection to $cientologie.  Having that background in something like a creative industry mafia, maybe they had access to resources that helped fuel their creativity?  Could they have taken advantage of others?  Did they use the musical equivalent of uncredited ghost writing?  No accusations, but it’s something that could fuel an interesting subplot, with all parts of the narrative fictionalized to avoid lawsuits.  May use “The Illumination Center” from my Spooktober idea Kill the Lights.
• Back Mask:  Another Spooktober idea, about a succubus figure infiltrating a record studio and causing a small music scene to blow up, disastrously.
• The Meat Puppets and Nirvana:  There’s the real deal, musician types with destructive habits and dubious ethics, and there’s the somewhat less talented guy who feels tormented by the idea he’s a poser, by inadequacy.  I also think of the Butthole Surfers.  I get the impression those are horrible people to know, like, they’d talk you into huffing gas out of a drowned bat and drive you to a donkey show in cartel country.  Or is that all image?  Also makes me think of a guy I personally used to know who was a unique character, but saddled with a considerable death urge.
• Untitled Asexual Musician Story:  Had an idea for a story about a young lady with unspecified disorders who gets brought into a punk/alternative band in the ’80s where her strange affect and interests garner attention.  But everybody wants to do her and she doesn’t wanna be done.  Feeling hemmed in by unwanted suitors, she waxes suicidal, but is saved by a vision of Karen Carpenter.
• The Question of Substance, We Must Kill the Jaguar Pope, Black Brass, Heavy Metal Thunder, Rock to Death, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, The Choking Game, I’m Your Turbo Lover:  More story ideas from Spooktober about drug culture, demons, and/or music.  Might incorporate some or all of them.  Maybe The Edge of Gone too.

__Initial Thoughts

• Another World.  A number of those ideas relate to a separate reality that is reached at the cost of losing your identity or your life.  The place where you meet Jesus or Karen Carpenter or Glasya-Labolas the Architect of Manslaughter.  I should decide on a “true nature” of it, even if I never include an explanation in-story.  Like I did with the angel business in Foothill Project.
• Searching for Satori.  Making art can be like caging lightning.  Any story about music is about making art.  The other world here is obvious as metaphor for this thing, for the achievement, for whatever the best music is hinting at, prying open in us.  What if there’s nothing there, or the thing you find is evil?
• The Outer Darkness.  D&D used that for the place where Lovecraft-knockoff shit comes from.  I sorta remember Billy Zane’s explanation of demons in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight.  He said they existed before god made the world and humans, and offended by this light, they seek to destroy it.

__The Stories

• Eruptions.  Some of the stories take the form of a supernatural phenomenon corrupting or killing victims in some kind of outbreak, like a disease, before they reach whatever climax and fade away.  Uzumaki-style, this could be structured like variations on a theme, each being a story to itself.  Eruption stories include Back Mask, The Question of Substance, Heavy Metal Thunder, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, arguably others as well.
• Monsters.  Some stories have a monster.  Back Mask, Black Brass, Turbo Lover, maybe others.  A monster should be inhuman, should be an agent of the other side.  Some people become monsters, like the Jaguar Pope and the guitarist in Rock to Death.
• Lotus Eaters.  Often closely related to Eruptions, drug/vice fads.  Heavy Metal Thunder, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, The Choking Game, Jaguar Pope.
• Bad Love.  Turbo Lover, Edge of Gone, Keep Austin Weird, Rock to Death.  I had an idea for an interlude in KAW inspired by some shit from my father’s drug culture stories.  The characters are invited to Mexico City by a rich kid that likes slumming with druggies.  They don’t know he’s rich and it’s a visit to his family, who are shocked and annoyed at him and his friends.  Their friend is a dangerous creep and murders his family while they are there.  They escape getting interrogated by cops and escape the country.  Made accessories?  I dunno.

That’s all for the moment, may add edits.

EDIT TO ADD:

__Condensing Soup

Boiling all these stories down to have less redundant plots.

• Dark Genesis Stories:  Black Brass, Poppies, Choking Game, Back Mask.  Poppies feels like upper class children, Choking feels like lower class children.  Brass and Mask feel like they could have origins in past lives or before history began, something primordial.
• Love Stories:  Keep Austin Weird, Edge of Gone, Turbo Lover, Rock to Death.  Of these I like the last one the least, the second one feels most out of place / hard to square because it’s a crowded epic and that’s a lonely story.  I do like it tho, and there are other lonely stories in this crowded house.  Dunno.
• Harried by Demons Stories:  Untitled Asexual Musician Story, Black Brass, Back Mask.  Characters under pressure or stress.
• Disappear Yourself Stories:  Edge of Gone, Untitled Asexual Musician Story, Black Brass, Question of Substance, Rock to Death.  I seem to keep coming back to this sort of resolution – characters walking off the edge of the map, never to be seen again.  I don’t know why I do this.  Feels sad but emotionally true for me in some way.
• Lotus Eater Stories:  Heavy Metal Thunder, Jaguar Pope, Poppies, Question of Substance, Choking Game.  Corruption, vice, masses moved by such.  Back Mask too, maybe.
• Monster Stories:  Black Brass, Rock to Death, Back Mask, Turbo Lover, Jaguar Pope.  Literal monsters.

__Actual Condensation Happens Here

• The Source:  The other world, the abyss, Hell, idk…  Demons such as the Brass vampire, the Mask demon, and the Turbo Lover come from there, as do the addictive things – poppies, jaguar drug, heavy metal thunder, the Mask demon’s song.
• Battle of the Bands:  Back Mask was about a record label that gets demon haunted.  Implies multiple bands.  Poppies is about a band, as is Rock to Death.  Maybe the epic is a series of stories that interweave told recursively like a 90s crime movie, each part named for a band or musician.
• Le $cientologie:  Poppies is about rich kids, so the dubious musical wunderkind can have origin there.  I was originally thinking about the main character being a black kid who was new to the rich school, becoming lead singer of a goth band.  I’d pictured main guy in Question of Substance as black, and this could easily be the same man.
• Crisscross:  Maybe the bands could trade members partway through the narrative.  Rich goth band breaks up and some of them join slummy grime people while others elevate grimes to new posh company.  This helps the interweaving and recombines company.
• Class Warfare:  Keep Austin Weird was about lovers from different worlds.  Maybe the record label can be the intersection – altho that doesn’t go well with the concept of two houses alike in dignity crossing blades.  I should really decide how I want to resolve that because I don’t wanna make more tragic gays than necessary in the world.
• Too Many Lonely Women:  Obvious solution to pair them off, except one is lonely from being lone ace girl in a world gone allo.  That could be a situation for queerplatonic relationship, but I have a bone to pick with lesbian stories (within the indie baby writer spaces I’ve been) for being too sexless.
• The Demons:  Thinking about how scattered this is, plotwise, and what can tie it together, if anything.  The demons.  Maybe the demons behind the different tracks have a plot of their own which sets the human stories in motion.  Like a unified demon story underlies the disparate human stories.
• $cientologiest is a Loser:  I don’t want him to come to a good end.  Maybe he’s the guy who drives Ace Musician to flee the scene.  Take that, pretty boy.
• No Antidiablo:  I like hell/devil stuff to be neutral to positive because I hate heaven a lot.  I do think humans have something terrible in ’em that leads them into dark places, personified in these kinds of narratives.  What could that be, if not devils?  Something to do with death.  I do hate death…  I dunno…

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