ParanetOnline
McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Lord Rae on December 07, 2012, 08:35:39 AM
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Still mentally blocked from writing on my main story and to keep myself from re-writing parts I've already finished I want to start a new project. I've got what to me sounds like a solid set of guidelines and conflicts but I can't decide on placement.
Masquerade - hidden world right alongside modern day earth
Broken Masquerade - hidden world has been exposed or gets exposed
Alternate Universe/world - A world like ours but with the different being magic or whatever.
I'm hesitant to use the masquerade type story partially because its been done so much but partially because I feel like its getting harder and harder to justify why someone wouldn't find out about the world or why it would be secret. Also if you keep everything hidden there is only so much damage you can cause and things you can change before it becomes silly if people don't notice.
What say you all about the options? What have you seen too often or too recently? How do you feel about them? Just trying to get some ideas that aren't my own...
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If you're thinking urban fantasyish, I'm right with you in finding the whole "huge secret history full of stuff that nobody in the mundane world knows about" hard to swallow, and would favour either of the latter two.
For what it's worth, one of my favourite recent examples of a sort-of broken masquerade is the Felix Castor series, where there have always been ghosts but they have been very rare and about ten years before the story starts they suddenly became much more common, along with other supernatural stuff, in ways that are generally known and having impact on mainstream society; figuring out what's going on and dealing with the consequences are a large part of what makes those books so good. As for sort of AH, I very much like David Wellington's Thirteen Bullets and sequels, which does a rather nice riff on the "if I didn't know better I'd think this looked like a vampire kill" thing, in which it turns out that the reason the cops are sure a vampire kill is impossible is because vampires have been extinct since the 1980s.
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Thanks Neuro. You are one of the posters around here I really respect even if I don't always agree. I haven't read the Felix Castor series but I'll have to look into it. Ditto on Thirteen Bullets.
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Thanks Neuro. You are one of the posters around here I really respect even if I don't always agree.
Thank you kindly.
I haven't read the Felix Castor series but I'll have to look into it. Ditto on Thirteen Bullets.
I should probably note that while the Castor series are UF with something of the underlying tone of, say, an Asimov mystery, Thirteen Bullets and sequels are very much more doing horror as an end in itself.
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The whole "Masquerade" idea seems to tie into the fact that humanity is too hung up on its own issues to notice what is really going on in the world. (Though I really don't like terms taken from rpg.)