My Most Outlandish Ideas for Books

Hey guys, sorry I haven't posted much at all these past few weeks. I've been busy preparing my students for their final exams, and of course, writing - unless I'm having some R&R to recuperate.

But that's going to change now. As in right now.

Let's talk book ideas. For the past couple of years, I'm all Pulau Purba this, Pulau Purba that. I've been putting up horror show after horror show, most recently with 'Through the Abyssal Gates' and soon, with His Model Son and in the immediate future (maybe months away), Project Shadolure (working title).

But as you guys may have guessed from my offering in 'Through the Abyssal Gates', I'm not all horror-y, well, maybe 90% anyway, or 91%. I do have a clear goal with that in mind - I want to be able to expand far beyond my current horizons, explore beyond known space, to see what's on the other side. It can't be all chaos Gods and shape-shifting aliens, can it?

Okay, better not answer that...

Anyway, I do have plans to go into science fiction and fantasy, even contemporary fiction.

In 'Through the Abyssal Gates', I've achieved the sci-fi bit with Agoraphobe, a story set in an incredibly, really, very crowded Singapore - centred around a waitress' day in the 2nd century megapolis. Let's just say it's not a bright and hopeful future I depicted.

Then with fantasy (with a lot of sci-fi elements smuggled in), I've tried it out with 'Faceless'. Set in a world that isn't ours, a boy has to return to a forest his father was lost in for a few days, and find out what had made him terminally ill in other to find a cure, or at least the truth. It's more of a horror science fantasy heh... A three-way genre combination.

But I plan to go even further beyond that. Expect any of these, and likely a good number of these, to come out in the next five years:

- LitRPG as a genre has been gaining prominence lately. I cannot discount the fact that horror games have just as much impact on me as horror novels/books either. Therefore, I'm thinking of writing a Horror LitRPG... A love letter to all those horror games I've been playing, and which helped shaped the psyche that had given birth, with much blood and gore spewed forth, to my writings.

- 'Faceless' is just a testing ground for a fantasy world I have in mind. A blend of sci-fi fantasy, of technology and magic inseparable. I'm thinking of starting a series on this. This is going to mean a lot, a lot of world-building, so it might even dwarf my debut project.

- Believe it or not, I'm actually also considering writing a fairy tale for adults and children alike, set in the same world as 'Faceless'. I mean, that's how The Lord of the Rings started, right? With The Hobbit? I don't mind going down the same path as Tolkien if that's what it takes for me to ease into the fantasy (+ sci-fi elements) genre. An idea that's holding much sway with me for now is to create an entirely new race of creatures, in addition to mankind, for a story that's just as much about telling a good tale (hopefully I'm up to it though) as much as doing what fairy tales do best - including certain messages in, and some of those messages might be socio-political critiques. Gotta give back to society, right? Chip in for the human race directly for once, eh?

- As for science fiction, I have a metric tonne of ideas, ranging from subjects like colonisation and space travel to aliens and their effects on humanity, to inter-dimensional travel... The scary thing is that I think many of these ideas I have are worthy of not just short stories, but also novellas and full novels. That's a lot of stuff to write about!

- Lastly, I've been collecting shipping containers' worth of story ideas... There are dozens of them by now, bits and bobs of story possibilities that I haven't shared yet.

My brain is expanding everyday, overfilling with ideas... I think my skull's cracking... Soon, my brain's going to implode from the pressure and there will be a glorious shower of blood and grey matter!