Stories you'd like to write

Every once in a while I have a random idea that I’d like to turn into a story (or poem or game or show or whatever) that I will never do because I’m pretty lazy / low energy / busy.

The last I had was a sci-fi graphic-novel premised on “body-swapping”.

Basically a brain-transplant surgery (which is in lots of stories) would be discovered, normalized, sold, regulated, etc. And my story would be about how it affects people (in various weird, sketchy, but not outright dystopian ways)

Potential uses would be:

  • Various people swapping for youth/fitness/fertility.
  • Trans swapping sexes.
  • Criminals swapping their criminal identity
  • A parent swapping with a dying child
  • Lovers swapping just because
  • Suicides swapping with the dying
  • And the main story would follow a person who works as a “body-flipper”. That is they are a market maker looking for ‘deals’ on bodies, with potential to improve, or swap again.

You should read the Unwind Dystology.

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I have had a similar story idea as well.

My premise is based on a real and terrible genetic condition called anencephaly, which means an embryo develops without a brain. The idea was that genetic research into this terrible condition led to situations where geneticists could control and intentionally induce the condition. Concurrently, the courts ruled that a fetus with no brain was not actually a human being. So a gestation host could have a baby with no brain, raise it for a few years in a rapid growth incubator and then its body could receive the brain transplant of the parent whose DNA was used to create the baby. Thus, humanity becomes one step closer to immortality.

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I’d like to write a story about an actuary who … wait, no one will ever want to read it.

Thinking about the OP’s idea, I also keep coming back to the movie Heavy Metal . . .

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That does look like a good, “should I give this to my kid? probably not!” type books.

I have to admit that I have a couple of “how to use ChatGPT to author a book” books in my Kindle Unlimited queue. I’ve had ideas for various fiction books over the years, but my writing sucks, so…

Those books haven’t percolated up to the top of that queue, but I expect those books will be examples of ChatGPT authorship.

I want to write a fantasy trilogy based on the premise that several tribes of “wolves” have sprung up in the U.S. to act as predators and cull out sick and weak from society. (The world I started building in a short story already.)

I want to finish my erotic thriller trilogy. (2 books drafted, 1 more to draft, then can edit and publish).

There’s a 2-book duology that’s centered around the idea of dramatically slowing human aging by factor of 10x or 20x, so that you can now put people behind bars for 500+ years.

I have the idea for a 7-book series called “Elevator to Everwhen”, where there’s a magic portal that allows people to travel to different times at the same point, where each book is a different style (romance, comedy, drama, western, mystery, fantasy, …).

And several others called “Not That Special”, “Iceberg”, “Achievement Mindset”, “[BLANK] Every Day”, and more.

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Not really a story per se, but after reading some of the “brilliant” ideas that some people have to “fix” the sport of hockey in general and the NHL in particular, I’m starting a project based around it.

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My unwritten actuary spec-fic involves a secret NSA project to build a massive predictive model trained on the internet text emails, sms, transcribed phone calls, purchases, health records, etc.

(This idea is 5 years old… Now of course it would just be an LLM.)

The goal is to detect terrorists or whatever, but it can’t of course because the sample size is too small. So when prototyping they pick a more common event – death-- and a life actuary is brought on to test its predictions against industry models.

It’s not super great at predicting deaths either, unless people go to the hospital or explicitly talk about their symptoms. But combined with existing models there is a small improvement that’s hard to explain. The actuary digs deeper into the test data, he finds that many of the new positives are divorcees for some reason.

At this point he pulls together a team to test for errors (data contamination is the obvious answer), but instead they find that the model is internally predicting who gets divorced, and divorce just happens to be a death covariate. And it turns out the model is actually really good at predicting divorce-- decades in advance.

Because whether people are truly compatible in the long run, is a reflection of their personalities, and how they feel about each other, which is unconsciously revealed in how they talk to one another. Not just what they say, but how they say it. Eventually, all of the main characters are driven to look themselves up, to find out whether they are probabilistically destined for divorce.

Throughout the story, I want to incorporate little emails and texts between the protagonist and his spouse. Nothing shocking, but enough to get a sense of their marriage.

The thesis of the story is that you if you could just look really, really closely at those same little missives, you could know if your love is true.

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