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As I mentioned in my last post, when my wife and I were first getting to know each other, we planned on working on a fictional story together. Before we decided to tackle the Snowflake saga, we played around with some other story ideas. I recently found that list of abandoned story concepts, and actually think they are much more entertaining as fragments. Here are some of my favorites:

1. A were-chimpanzee is terrorizing a small Nebraskan town – stealing bananas from supermarkets, gobbling up little children at night, etc. A world-famous hunter is brought in to kill it, but he eventually learns that the were-chimpanzee is actually his long-lost brother. To further complicate matters, the brother takes a liking to the hunter’s wife and turns her into a were-chimpanzee also. The entire state of Nebraska is in mortal danger of being overrun by demon chimps unless the hunter does something to stop them..
2. A man falls into a swamp down in the Florida Everglades. Hungry gators approach, but when they get close, they suddenly turn around and swim quickly away. Why are the gators afraid of him? The man desperately tries to find out, but will his curiosity be his undoing?
3. A man tries to pilot a helicopter through a McDonald’s drive-through. A couple of heads get chopped off
4. A dentist has a nervous breakdown and starts giving everyone in town vampire-like fangs. The people are too polite to complain, so tourists passing through are afraid they are in Vampire Town (which is actually 20 miles south of this town)
5. A girl actually befriends a diamond because of the cultural stereotype. Turns out the diamond was just using her cuz she had a car. Did I mention the diamond was from outer space and can talk?
6. Mobsters just can’t seem to knock off this one squealer. They’ve tried everything: shooting him in the head, cementing his feet and throwing him into the river, putting an ignition-triggered bomb in his car, lighting him on fire…various coincidences allow for the squealer to pull through each time. It turns out, a rival mob family keeps saving this guy to make the other mobsters believe he is Lazarus.
7. Scandal breaks out in the Catholic Church when a mysterious document surfaces which suggests that St. Patrick was murdered by leprechauns.
8. A mad scientist becomes the laughing stock of the mad scientist community when the spider that he enlarged to be 1,000,000 x its normal size can’t even walk due to the physics involved.
9. A man gets stranded on a desert island with his ex-wife, his 5th grade math teacher, a depressed clown, a flesh-eating squirrel, and 438 cans of tomato soup.
10. A ghost learns of a way to come back to corporeal life but to do so, he must track down all of the organs he donated from the various recipients and return then to his body. He faces two challenges. First of all, the spell only works if he takes his organs without doing permanent damage to the recipients. in other words, he has to find them new organs. The other challenge is that he can not really move solid things, so he needs to learn how to possess people. When he possesses a nurse in a morgue, he ends up falling in love with her.
11. Research indicates that teleportation is theoretically possible. However, matter isn’t actually transmitted, it is copied. On one end, an object is scanned and the information is transmitted. This process actually destroys the original object. On the other end, the object is recreated. A scientist is able to make a machine to do this, and decides to be the guinea pig. However the copy of him on the other side that materializes is a completely soulless thing…who happens to be nicer, smarter, better at sports and overall more fun. This is all fine and good until he starts to feel badly for is former self and he has an identity crisis.
12. A cat burglar suddenly loses her game when she comes down with chronic hiccups.Her friends tell her she should retire, but she decides to make on last score. She knows she can make millions on eBay by selling a heavily guarded secret recipe for chicken gumbo. The only problem is that the chef is married to the doctor that is working to cure her hiccups. In addition to the logistic difficulties of the job, she has a moral crisis. How can she steal from someone who is trying to help her?

I think I might start coming up with more premises like these. It is really fun. Especially if you are a lazy story-teller who doesn’t have the wherewithal to work past the initial spark of inspiration!