I absolutely need information pertaining to Arranged Marriage in Space as well as Concerning Dragons!
Yesssss two of my weird experimental projects!!! Eeeee I will gladly tell you more.
"Arrange Marriage in Space" has no working title yet, but it does have the requisite "here's a bunch of names that suit this world" list that signals I'm thinking seriously about a project. It also has a little over 5,000 words of a test draft. It even has a rough outline. I compiled all of that in the space of 24 hours and then completely abandoned it, oops.
Basic plot: Idone, a noblewoman from an old but not-too-rich merchant family, has just married Baona, the oldest son of a wealthy and influential noble family who live on a space station orbiting a partially-terraformed planet. From a political and social standpoint, it's a good marriage, but it's rife with awkwardness. Idone keeps making social blunders, butts heads with her mother-in-law, gets a little too excited about her brother-in-law's work on the planet, and...ends up pregnant quite unexpectedly.
It's just a drama fest for the sake of drama and was a DELIGHT to outline. I asked my writing friend Ally how to write slow-burn romance just for this, lol. The biggest challenge with this, and the reason I will need to give it my full attention when I write it, is that I don't want Idone and Baona to be like every other couple I've ever written. The current length goal is a short story or novelette.
"Concerning Dragons" boasts some of my oldest concept characters, chief among them a dragon hunter with a flair for the dramatic. The set-up lays out like the start of a DnD campaign, where a group of adventurers wander into a tavern and hire a dragon hunter to help them on their quest (finding a dragon to answer some riddles, probably involving a magic sword). It doesn't have a plot to speak of, but the characters have been fun to pick at. I've got a woman hiding her identity as the future queen; a bodyguard who's probably missing an eye; a dorky healer and his awesome wife; and the healer's shy sister with uncontrollable magic. The dragon hunter is a bit of an enigma but I know she also has cool magic, and a hidden agenda.
With this story, I'm toying with a magic system with that relies largely on seventh-born children; this has major ethical and cultural ramifications I can't wait to explore, even though it's not the main plot of the story. I will probably pick at development for this story for several more years before anything comes of it.
