[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 9).]
[In response to the question, "How many unwritten novels does this community have between them, I wonder?"]
Lets see, that was five I've mentioned so far, then there's the thing where someone dates and angel and ends up pursuing a run and hide strategy since God, who violates the evil overlord list because said violation is the centerpiece of his entire society, does not approve. Main characters end up enlisting the help of Greek gods in the process. I figure I got about 90 thousand words into that, give or take. Unfortunately they weren't very well written words.
There was an entire series of books in a single contemporary fantasy setting where I'd just come up with a premise, figure out where it fit in the timeline and say, "Someday I'll make a novel of this."
There was the idea about various people with special powers (manipulate time in a bubble around yourself to move really fast or slow, walk through walls, teleport, the like) each such type power has its own conspiracy trying to capture/kill/control/do bad things to the people with that power. They all do such a good job of keeping it hidden that everyone assumes the special power they have/deal with is the only such power. The plot is what happens when suddenly the various groups become aware of each other.
A take off on Percy Jackson (the movie, I haven't read the book) where main character's lineage was downgraded from "Child of Poseidon" to "Child of the Goddess of Dew" and most of his/her problem solving takes the form of trying to figure out a way to make the ability to cause water to form on surfaces somehow useful. (As Athena-child points out, creation ex-nihilo is nothing to scoff at.) Also, instead of hiding him by grabbing a stepfather whose stench would keep him hidden, they hid her by making her a boy. Main character was very pissed off, supernatural beings didn't understand. (What's wrong with being male? At least you stayed human, I once had to spend three years as a cow.)
Something about werewolves that was lacking in plot because I tried to do the whole write a novel in a month thing with no preparation (though not during the proper month) I think it was supposed to end with the evil politically connected werewolf hunters being taken down by arranging that they would be stopped by the FBI while in possession of detailed records of their shady dealings that they had confiscated by pretending to work for the FBI.
Another thing that I tried to do for a novel in a month thing, this time at the proper time but it turned out that November was busy for me last year. The basic premise was that when Lucifer fell to earth reality itself shattered, hell was built between the cracks. For people with a natural affinity it was possible to choose to travel to the space between the cracks rather than across them (to the casual observer they'd appear to disappear.) And something about a demon doomsday cult.
I've wondered if some of my more stand alone Right Behind stories might be novel material, Not Even the Angels in Heave, A World Without God, Where Antichrists Come From.
A story set in the future in a virtual reality game world. The game has dungeons and whatnot but mostly it's a wide open sandbox for people to do what they wilt in it. (The lead character is a shopkeeper in the game world who, by selling his virtual currency for real money to people who don't want to do the work to get it on their own, is able to afford the bare minimum necessary to stay alive and connected in the real world, his poor real world living conditions don't bother him because he's got a good quality of life in the virtual reality.) The plot of the novel would be how a group of characters came together when a massive power outage threw the game world into chaos (people who lost power were disconnected resulting in a sort of mini rapture, the more pvp users saw this as a golden opportunity to have the sort of fun that tended to end badly for everyone else.) At the end the characters would have formed a team that would do city saving heroics again in the future on an ongoing basis. (Or smaller level heroics, probably more on an A-Team level.)
An alien invasion gets screwed up when one of the first scouts of the body taking over aliens merges with the host instead of taking over. The aliens were aware that this would happen once or twice sooner or later, but the fact that it happened so early on is problematic for them. The story would be told in first person plural except briefly when the aliens attempt to use torture to separate the alien and human.
An alien invasion that gets screwed up because, in order to properly blend, the initial invaders didn't know they were aliens with their alien memories only emerging at the proper time, at which point they cared about as much about their alien hopes and dreams as you or I might about plans for the future we made when we were four.
An alien invasion story of the "We merge with your minds" variety in which turns out that almost everyone who escaped the doomed town was actually an alien. Not an alien particularly bent on invasion, but this would be one of those paranoid "Who's one of them?" stories and it would turn out to be everyone but that guy, "that guy" being the one who kept on saying, "I don't care who's one of them, what we're doing to find out is morally wrong and I refuse to be a part of it." Then they'd all go their separate ways in peace.
Something about two teenagers who met in Pompeii becoming inexplicably immortal and taking nearly 2000 years to run into each other again. I may or may not have put more thought into it than that.
A time traveler gets stuck in the past and sullenly explains to the local rulers that there's nothing he can say about his technology that will help because it requires an infrastructure they simply don't have. He say's the Archimedean screw is more useful than anything he could offer. They don't know about the Archimedean screw. He cheers up and explains that in that case he can be very useful indeed. Years later the kingdom is thriving and working it's way in the direction of whatever passes for utopia in the absence of penicillin. The literacy rate is high, the people are well treated, and the envoy just returned from the east with copies of scrolls talking about all of that cool stuff the eastern empire kept alive after the fall of the west. (Look up Heron of Alexandria, the man was amazing.)
Everything is looking wonderful until more time travelers show up who have identified this as a point where interference with history could destroy the future. Apparently the kingdom is to be destroyed and everyone in it either slaughtered or sold off into slavery. If Anachronism City State isn't destroyed then the changes made to them will rewrite history. Original time traveler doesn't give a damn. The people in front of him are the ones he cares about, the future can go to Hell if it's advocating for mass murder. One of the new time travelers is captured, the philosophy of time travel is discussed, and finally at the command of the original time traveler new-time traveler is given a bucket, put on fire suppression duty and told, "If you really think these people deserve to die, let them." That doesn't happen, putting out fires leads to fighting to save the city, the future be damned.
For a completely different take on time travel, time is a spatial dimension. Time travelers have learned to navigate it as easily as the others. A thriving city exist in a single moment, with those still in the normal timestream existing like statues around which those who are outside of normal time live and work. A giant minefield is set up to prevent people from changing the past before a certain point. Settlements are made close to this minefield because changes in time can be pretty catastrophic for those outside of it. (Think about what happens when the building your standing on ceases to have ever been constructed.) A totalitarian regime is being fought, in large part through the use of a five pound remote control bomb, well, that and the ability to traverse the minefield to put it as far back as needed. (One push of the button releases the bomb into the timestream set to detonate in three seconds. Another push removes it from the timestream before it detonates. One click knocks the comet off it's appointed path and into the enemy instillation, a second click puts things right back how they were.)
A couple of things about prophesy, possibly combined into one thing such that one of them became a story within a story.
Probably various other things as well, I should dig out my old notebooks some time.
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