The gallery of my longer story ideas.. o__o
 

drawing a breath of air: This is probably my most thought out idea, since I actually have several pages of it written (though what's written desperately needs rewriting, methinks)--it's the rename for 'beautiful creatures', and when I finish Claris I think I might take time out to work on this baby some more.  My attempt at a weird, not very long romance story. About a girl (yes, my main characters are almost always female) named Aylia Rose who lives in Vinton (Briana and Co. from Stimulus live in Vinton as well, and so do Keagan et al) with her journalist father (her mother is a lawyer who lives in New York or California or somewhere, they're divorced). She's good-natured but sort of selfish (like most people) and very much wrapped up in her own world. She loves to paint, and has a tiny studio attached her house for just that. Her best friend is a talented (female) soccer played named Jordan who is rather possessive of her..  Aylia works at Vinton's library part time, and it is after leaving there one time that she gets caught in the rain and ducks into a forest. There she meets a strange man called Vande (sort of Reve's  prototype, minus the butterfly obsession and Oedipus complex), who lives in an odd, ethereal garden. Vande tells her that he is blind (which he is), but he can see souls (which he can). He says that it's very lonely in his garden and would she like to come see him again? She agrees, and all is well. But Vande is actually an animium vespertilium, or, in other words, a soul vampire.  But, the reason why he's blind to all but soul energy is because he, disgusted with himself, starved for so long without souls that eventually his body no longer needed them to continue on. The pain of the experience shattered him (and his eyesight), however.. and he also has to contend with his six brothers and sisters (the seven of them are the only soul vampires in existence). The first of these is Kvan, who at first decides to kill/eat Aylia's soul to get a rise out of Vande, but is distracted by a naive patron of Vinton's Library. Judith Blanche is a 22 year old mousy type who loves to read romance novels but has not--ever--been on a date. She has an intense fear of flesh and blood men, which is always overpowered by her desire to be with one. Kvan sees her as the perfect prey. Jordan, meanwhile, is very disgruntled by Aylia's increased visits with Vande, and Vande is very disgruntled by Kvan's increased visits with Judy, and so on and so forth. The Chrysalis of the Mind: Okay, this one is really in need of development..  it's my attempt at a true fantasy story, being that it takes place entirely on Septerra (my fantasy world type thing). Princess Septima is the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter, born on the seventh second of the seventh minute of the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year..etc. So everyone thinks she's really special, but really, she's not--she acts like your typical princess and follows all the rules, unlike her sisters, who are always behaving more liberally and trying to run away and be tom boyish, or the princes, who are mostly gay and feminine. ; Her only friends are a group of elemental faeries (who do not have names). Life changes when an albino thief boy named Astyanax is hired to kidnap her, which he does, and he finds himself quite surprised when she doesn't even attempt to retaliate by running off when he's not looking or stabbing him in the back or something equally unpleasant. He brings her back to his little thieves' den, where the older people in the group (which is headed by a muscley-yet-pretty woman) are planning to sell her off..since everyone still thinks she's special. Septima is not entirely keen on this idea, and her faerie friends aren't either--so they come to help her. Astyanax (who isdeveloping a growing fascination with Septima's quiet-but-not-weak personality) attempts to step on them (being that they are faeries, they're  only about six inches tall), but thanks to the wonders of an enlarging spell  they basically beat the crap out of him. Septima feels bad for him and convinces the faeries to let him alone, so they leave. Astyanax, after he comes to, sets out after them. I'm not quite sure what happens after that (even the above is sketchy sketchy), but there are some terribly psychotic villains and forces threatening their world, so it's all good. Stimulus: The renamed version of 'of light and darkness'... Even more freaky than Claris, it deals mostly with this girl named Rachel, who was murdered when she was 17. 17 years after the burial, Rachel showed up on her mother's doorstep, looking perfectly healthy (if slightly pale). Her mother (who has no name yet) is naturally a little more than distressed by this, but her other daughter Briana (who is 16, having been born just before Rachel's death) is happy--her mother had never told her about her sister's death. The mother (who is very weakwilled and depressed most of the time) thusly tries to act like everything's normal, but then weird stuff starts happening to Briana--whenever she walks by a mirror, she sees bloody, violent murders in the background of her reflection. Feeling sure that she's going insane, she confides this to her best friend, a dimunitive boy named Drelan (he's 15 1/2).  Meanwhile, people actually are dying, at the hands of Rachel, no less (though of course Briana doesn't know this). So the question is, who the hell is this person claiming to be Rachel? Why is Briana's mother so spineless? And why is Briana having scary visions? Etc. Second Truth: The first original story idea I ever had, this concerns the lives of three people--Keagan, Drake, and Allana, though Keagan is the main character. Keagan lives in a little house with her father, a man named Cromwell who is also one sick bitch.  Whenever he's angry with her (which is often), he attacks her back  with a knife--which is why said back is almost completely covered in scars.  She's incredibly mature and level-headed, but she rarely ever talks and most often has a depressed look on her face, so most people pass her off as another brooding teenager. Drake is this homeless boy (Sean's prototype,  really, but Drake's not a violent sociopath) that looks after her (he doesn't know what her father does, just that she always seems mildly disgruntled) and talks to her and does all the friendship stuff. In return she brings him food  and cuts his hair.  Allana is the unfathomably rich girl, and Drake pretty well despises her (because he just hates rich people on instinct, being homeless.. ). She has a lot of mental issues.  The story is mostly about what happens to them when they're all unceremoniously tossed into Septerra (the fantasy world mentioned earlier), where they meet such lovely people as Raikal and his twin brother Astyr (the vampire bruthas) and several people who try to pose at Keagan's father (a good bit of the story is about the fact that hey, Cromwell is not her father, her father is someone important that Cromwell supposedly killed, but Keagan doesn't believe him, etc). Like  everything else I'm telling you about here, it's very much in the larvae stage of story planning..