Still More of Trudy's Universes

I think if I could sit here and work on my stories for 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week, I would not need any ‘new’ ideas for at least a decade. Think I’m kidding? Here’s some more of my folders:

G is for Gothic. 3 decades ago, ‘Gothic’ was a specific type of romance where the setting was some out-of-the-way household owned by a brooding but handsome bachelor who is obviously keeping some horrible secret from the heroine. I never read a lot of them, but I do have one story in this folder that I wrote and submitted to an anthology. I came )( this close to being accepted, but in the end, they chose other stories. So this story is currently sitting on a different editor’s desk, waiting for him to make a decision.

H is for Halves. A few years ago, I was told by another author, “Everybody’s writing vampires and werewolves.” She was right, but I went ahead and created my own anyway. A vampire is neither alive nor dead, so he could be thought of as half of both. A werewolf is partly human and partly wolf, so he’s halfway both, too. And these guys have a friend who helps them do things, who is of mixed ancestry, so … also a half. Thus I named this trio ‘The Halves’. None of them talk very much, which makes getting a complete story out of them a long deal.

K is for Kandi. Kandi is a member of the same alien race that produced the Atlans, but the crew of this ship was her parents, who had left home for their honeymoon and never went back. When their ship was punctured by a freak meteorite, baby Kandi was thrown into a lifeboat. The lifeboat landed in the Dakota badlands, and Kandi was adopted by a Native American couple, and raised as one of their own. Kandi joins the Space Fleet (precursor to the Fleet that Mac belongs to) and Kandi is kidnapped by a derelict ship her crew is exploring. Kandi spends the rest of her long life exploring the universe, gathering together a rag-tag crew of aliens.

We’re over halfway through my universe folders now. Do you see any patterns in what I tend to write? I do. I’ve been aware of them for some time, and that knowledge has encouraged me to explore new universes. As we age, we have opportunities to grow, to adapt our outlook on life. I suspect my newer universes reflect that change in me and some of my universes may – eventually – be left to their own devices.