But I can't seem to make any of my stories work together. They all occur in completely different places and must occur there. It's getting frustrating.
 

The two most dissimilar--no. There's no way they'd go.

The one is the idea of the woman whose husband gets a face transplant from her brother.

The other is a villain "species" in the far future made up of members of different species who are all infected with the same virus that makes them crave violence like they crave air, water, and food. A decent guy gets infected and races to find the cure before he kills the ones he loves most, meanwhile fighting the urge to join the army of those who are lost to the infection.

The first story has to take place in the near future. The second is so far in the future as to be in an unrecognizable universe. How do I merge them?

This is what I'm talking about. There just is no way to make these stories work together, but when I try to write each individually, there's just not enough there to be interesting.
 

Maybe the issue is that you need more ideas. OK, so there's a woman whose husband gets bro's face. You can expand this way:

* And then what happened?
* Why?
* What else happened?

Over and over, till you get a lot of ideas. Maybe enough to get a whole story. Or maybe some of them will fit in with the racing-for-the-cure guy.

(I never could get OSC's idea of merging ideas to give me a coherent short story, either ... at least, not intentionally. But I could put things together in a novel that way.)
 

Generally I find that my ideas come as scenes that I think would be dramatic (like if I could turn it into a movie.. with internal monologue). Or bits of writing that I think would sound dramatic ("death with a list").

So far the only approach I've gotten any success with is to mash a whole bunch of them together and pick out the bits that don't fit. Even then, all I get is a plotline.. and most of those don't work.

I haven't read Magic Street (YET), so I can't comment on that.

<incoherent mumbling about a conspiracy theory on Survivor>

[This message has been edited by Noctivigant (edited September 09, 2005).]
 

Exactly. And when combining ideas, you needn't stay married to the original ideas -- let them develop.

At the Writers of the Future workshop, you have to write a short story in 24 hours, using an object given to you by Tim Powers and an interview with a stranger.

The first time I was at the workshop, the object was a packet of sugar that Powers told me to prentend was salt. And my interview was with a caricature artist. I ended up writing a story about an oil painter in medieval England who encounters an apothecary with cursed salt. The path from the object and the interview to the story is fairly easy to trace.

The second time I was at the workshop, the object was a pair of reading glasses, and the interview was with a wandering, homeless, family-less clown from Belize with a kitten named Pepper (the kitten's name, not the clown's.) I ended up writing a story about an interstellar cargo pilot who encounters a roving AI ship near a star that has just gone hypernova. The path from the original seeds is not so clear, so I'll sketch it out.

The reading glasses had lenses, which eventually led to the idea of a gravitational lens, which eventually led me to the idea of quasars, which led me to the idea of gamma ray bursts, which led me to the idea of hypernovas.

Meanwhile, the wandering clown with no family became a wandering AI ship with no family, and then the kitten became the AI's not-yet-completed offspring.

Of course, that story would never have come about if I'd stuck to the glasses as glasses and the clown as a clown. (Not that you have to go far afield to write a good story: Another WOTF writer also interviewed the same clown and wrote a very good story about a clown and a three-eyed alien monkey.)
 

I think that if you combine two ideas, you should try and achieve a balance between them, let each idea have a real impact on the other. Card even had a character in the book who was originally interested in African folklore traditions, but he failed to bring in any of those stories, he relied entirely on the Shakespeare angle (which was ironic, given that Titania and Puck were both constantly saying it wasn't a reliable or accurate portrait).
 

So, I'll go start that topic and hope that people will be willing to talk about how two or more ideas grew into the stories they've written.

Edited to include link:

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum1/HTML/002442.html

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited September 10, 2005).]
 

Maybe the guy gets the virus as a result of the tissue transplant. In a culture where such frivolous transplants were common, it is likely enough, or if the children of people who had them could get it as well as the fathers. Retroviruses can get into the male gametes.
 

Off to go write it down while it's fresh.
 

The problem with merging them is that the face transplant story is supposed to be a bit of a horror, where it's not a common procedure yet. Her husband and brother get in a car accident together, hubby's face gets horribly burned, brother dies but has his face intact, so the surgery is attempted.

Even if the husband doesn't look much like the brother, I would be freaked out as a wife.

But it's not enough of a story as is. Wife sees husband. Is freaked out. The end.
 

Etc, etc, etc. I bet there's a bunch of stories in that idea. Just keep playing with it.
 

The problem with the face transplant is that the only part being transplanted is the skin. The underlying bone and muscle is what gives your face all of it's distinctive characteristics. So a "face transplant" wouldn't result in a close resemblance between the donar and recipient.

There are also issues of consent and everything. Someone would have to release the brother's tissues for transplant and someone would have to give the husband's consent to the operation.

So how about this, it's a brain transplant. They get in a wreck, the automated medical recovery unit gets there and pull out one body that's basically been completely crushed, including the skull, but the brain is still viable, while the other body is fine except for a strut that went clear through the head from the temple. The time limit for the operation to keep the brain alive is six hours, consent forms are automated through insurance coverage in the future and the brother had a blanket clause allowing any of his organs to be used to save the life of a relative in the event of his death.

That puts your "face transplant" story a good long ways into the future. Then the guy realizes that he simply can't go back and live life in his brother-in-law's body. So he goes out and kinda becomes a soldier of fortune or what have you. Eventually he meets this army of retro-gengineered crazies and discovers (or his robo-doc friend does) that they're being manipulated by an artificial virus that alters their brain chemistry making them prone both to violence, easily brainwashed, and dependent on a synthetic drug distributed to them by the bad guys.

Unfortunately, he gets infected with the virus while studying it (usually the victim is exposed to the virus during the brain-washing program), and has only a limited amount of time before he either goes berserk from the virus or dies because of not having the controlling drugs. So there you have it.

Unfortunately, these two ideas still don't have that much in common. I mean, he's got a reason for wandering around like this, but how that makes him especially qualified to fight the bad guys is unclear to me. So maybe it's a government plot, and he used to be a researcher in this field before he decided to go ahead and pretend that he died in the accident too. That way, when the bad guys round up all the experts that would be able to stop them, they miss this guy, because he disappeared for personal reasons before they started disappering all his collegues.

Oh, and the government can be controlled by aliens
 

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum1/HTML/002289.html