Sci Fi Movie Fun

I saw this on a blog and thought it looked like fun.

Here’s how this works. Copy the list below. Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book. Italicize the ones you’ve watched.

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant (The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack (Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing (Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce (Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo (Weapon)
42. The Handmaid’s Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

Okay, so I didn't read all of Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds, but I tried. I had to return War of the Worlds to the library before I could finish it, and the writing was probably above me at the time I tried reading it. But I did listen to the radio broadcast on audio cassette, if that makes up for it. Oh, and for Dune, I saw the newer miniseries, or at least part of it, but I own a couple of the books (all unread).

Also, I, Robot shouldn't count, or at least the one with Will Smith since that was originally an original screenplay. (It was the producers or someone who said to add some Asmovian elements to it to make it appeal to a wider audience.)

I might have watched Cocoon, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Thing, and some others, but I don't remember.

Inspiration, Take 2

I actually get most of my inspiration from movies, but in a way, it's not really inspiration for a completely new story. It's more like somewhere in my brain, I think, hey, I should turn that into a story. But I don't do anything with that idea until I see a movie that's similar to my idea, and I think, that would be a really fun story to work on.

Examples
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End -- This made me want to write a pirate story, but rather than returning to the pirate story I had started a couple years before, I started a new one (but that was partly because I was living in South Korea and my notes were in Minnesota). I guess you could say the inspiration for the plot came when I asked one of the other English teachers what came to mind when they thought of Eastern dragons, which I think they said "fate."

Vampire movies -- Whether they're good or really, really bad, watching vampire movies always makes me want to work on Standard Issue. I don't even know how the idea got started, just that my husband was like, why is it that in every vampire movie all the vampires have to have the same "standard issue" clothing (of you know, black and leather and tight).

B-Rate horror movies -- I was creating a character for a role-playing game set in the modern day that was supposed to be vaguely horror-ish (the game, not the character), when I needed something for her and her "sidekick" to do while the guys tried to show off, thinking they knew how to destroy the big bad monster. So my character and her sidekick watched b-rate horror movies, which seemed appropriate considering that the adventure seemed like it was taken straight from a B-horror movie anyway. Add a few writing exercises for one of my creative writing classes at college, giving the character a degree in zoology, and well . . . I'm still waiting to write Mission #1: Tank Riding Zombies, but my husband wants to start a webcomic with her and the character he created in our creative writing class.

Okay, so those last weren't exactly the initial inspiration for the story, but close enough.

I also get inspiration from dreams, music, and drawings.

Dreams -- I haven't really dealt much with the stories I want to write based off some of my dreams, but their basic ideas are in the background for the main world that my stories take place in. I call them the Psychic series, but mostly they're biopunk. Though I wrote one short story in that series while I was in Korea, but that inspiration came from the high security system for the place I worked at and how seemingly easy it was to get around it. (Of course, I wish I had that short story in Japan with me rather than in MN since I would really like to edit it and submit it.)

Music and Drawings -- Pai's story is actually inspired from both. Pai is a character I drew during 11th or 12th grade, though she didn't become a character until sometime after I was in college. Sometime later I was listening to "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica and I thought it would be fun to write a story based on the lyrics to that song. Well, since most things don't turn out how you think they will, especially when it comes to plotting, I've decided that the song that much better describes her first book is "No Leaf Clover" by Metallica. But if I'm lucky, book 4 will finally give me the "Nothing Else Matters" type of story.

There are many other places I can get inspiration from, and each of my stories probably has their own inspiration story, but that'll be saved for a later time.

Movies and Inspiration

I have this habit that when I watch a movie I really enjoy, I usually have one of two reactions.
1. That is the best movie in the world, I wish I could write a story as good as that.
2. I want to write something like that.

The last movie this happened with was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. So I spent about a month outlining a pirate novel, called The Emerald Dragon. It's about a girl named Teague, the youngest dolphin shapeshifter, and the Emerald Dragon, a statue that controls fate. Of course I didn't get much past the first chapter because I went back to working on Kitsune.

The newest movie this happened with was She's the Man, and I kind of got two stories out of it.

The first story's about a character I played in a fantasy role-playing game about a young noble lady who gets mad at her parents for trying to force her into a marriage with a proper noble. She's not too keen on the idea, so she uses a magical medallion to disguise herself as a man so she can enter the jousting tournaments.

I've been wanting to work on that story since we stopped playing that game because I really like the character. Unlike most of my female characters, she's very strong in a quiet sort of way, at least while she's female. But, when the game ended, she was in the Afterlife after having carried one of the other character's dead body out of some underground vault. I don't remember exactly what was going on, but I do know that it was very important for my character to win the other character's respect. Mainly because he was the closest to seeing through her disguise, and she didn't want anyone to know what was really going on until she was ready to reveal it herself. (Which if she had her way wouldn't be until she found a man worthy of her.)

But rather than starting that story at the beginning, with the girl getting upset about her parents trying to set up another arranged marriage for her and then her using the medallion to disguise herself as a man, I wanted to start the story closer to where we stopped playing the game. Which is in the Afterlife. Only something went wrong. Because instead of being a female in the Afterlife, she's male. And she finds herself falling for the rogue-assassin whose dead body she had carried until she died.

The best title I have for this right now is We Fell in Love in the Afterlife, but I think it's a little too long.

Though for whatever reason when I start putting it to paper, I ended up making the main character a high school girl from the 21st century who somehow travels to this fantasy world where this young noble lady lives. And in the process of figuring out how to get out of the girl's body and back home, she ends up needing to learn how to joust and falls in love with the rogue-assassin. I don't think the two character concepts mesh very well, but my brain seemed to think so.

The second story I started working on is called Catfight, at least for the time being. It's also another story I've been wanting to write for quite some time. This one has to do with high school, tae kwon do, love letters, and girls fighting over the same guys. Unlike pretty much every other story I have ever written, this one has absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural, sci fi, or fantasy.

I haven't written much in either. But I want to work on Catfight until June, when I plan to go back to Kitsune.