Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

I was looking at two writing projects I had started a while back. I thought maybe I could go back to them. I'm just not sure which one has the most potential.

Both of these were written to be a series of blog posts from the main characters as the story is progressing, kind of like their journal.

The first story is about three friends that build a time machine. The main story arc is about their search for Atlantis before it sank, including a meeting with Plato and an accident that sends them off course. I completed the first story arc and was brain storming a second story. Since the machine travels through time and space, I thought maybe they use it to search for alien life.

The second story is about a group of people that wake up in a forest with no idea how they got there. They discover that they are from different places and even different times. As they try to search for civilization, they soon learn that they are on a plateau and there are dinosaurs there. They find a bunker and find a message left behind by someone else who was brought there like they were. With this story, I started it, but I never figured out where it was going. I did consider that there were two races behind what was happening, trying to use the characters to interfere with the others goals.

So, which of the two do you all think I should dust off first?

I have to say that I am a huge fan of time travel so they both sound intriguing. And I think both could be fantastic but the second one has that little extra spark to make it really special. I think it's the mystery of the whole scenario. Good luck with whichever one you choose!

Someone else told me something similar, but suggested I ask a few more people, so I posted it here. Thanks for the input. I still need to figure out what's behind the mystery so I know where the story is going.

Are you deciding on which idea to drop, or which idea to flesh out first? Because to me, both seem really interesting, so it would be a shame if one of them got dropped ...

The second story sort of sounds like Lost. Sounds to me like the first one is episodic, vaguely connected stories, and that you have an idea for another adventure there. I'd go with that.

I like both ideas, so I won't drop either of them. So this is deciding which to work on first.

When I came up with the second idea, I went back and watched a lot of Lost to try to figure out why it was so popular when it came out. And so it does have a few ideas from that show.

I like the aspect of the people from different time periods being pulled into the story in the second option. They would all react to events in very different ways, and given the clothing of different time periods it could add to the problems they have to deal with (try navigating a jungle in a hoop skirt). The only problem is figuring out how they would all communicate with each other unless you just have them all inexplicably speak the same kind of English. Lots of room for putting together a team of characters with various strengths and weaknesses.

Andrea wrote: "I like the aspect of the people from different time periods being pulled into the story in the second option. They would all react to events in very different ways,..."

Actually sounds a bit like Farmer's Riverworld (To Your Scattered Bodies Go, etc.) Except, since everyone shows up on Riverworld naked, there are no hoop skirts to worry about. :)

I'm familiar with Riverworld. It's a good story. The similarities are unintentional. I was actually trying to borrow ideas from the tv series The Lost World (based on Doyle's novel). I decided people from different times to be different.

In my story they showed up clothed. And one woman, from the 1600s or 1700s did have a full skirt which snagged on branches.

Jared wrote: "Both of these were written to be a series of blog posts from the main characters as the story is progressing, kind of like their journal.."

I'm going to show my age here, but a series of blog posts is not want I want to read in a novel (I'm dreading the day where I find a book written as a twitter feed or youtube comment section). At the very least there should be an in-story reason why this format is used, but these stories don't seem to lend into it (the 2nd especially - I'm assuming they don't have wi-fi).
You don't specify if it's targeted at YA, if it is the audience will be more accepting.

That being said the second story seems to me to have the most potential, but I'd say it will ultimately depend on how you explain things.

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. Neither of these would be novels. I would be writing it for a website again, another blog story. I want it to be something where the reader comes to my site to read the entry (200-500 words) and have them wanting to know what happens next so they come back later in the week for the next entry. Like a web comic without the drawings.

I'm not targeting it at YA, I don't know/understand that demographic to write for them. I'm not even sure I knew them when I was part of them.

And in both stories I had in story explanations of why it was present that way. The time travel story they were maintaining a website as a live journal of their search for Atlantis, they came back to the present after each trip to report and research more. In the plateau story there was a computer in the bunker with dial up. They wrote a program to post to a website as a call for help. However, all they could send was text. It then became a journal of them being trapped.

Thank you, all of you, for your opinions.

After much thought and consideration, and after all of your input, I have decided to go with option 3. I'm going to take what I liked best in both of those ideas and make a new story. And I've decided to set it in space. The main character finds himself on a spaceship, sent to him by a mysterious alien for vague reasons. He decided to recruit some of his friends as crew and set out to explore the cosmos. I'm trying for something like Dark Matter or Stargate Universe with a little bit of Firefly.

I brainstormed about 10 pages of ideas this week, but haven't settled on the plot yet. My current working idea is that after they start exploring, they follow a vague message that was left on the ship and search for the origin of the big bang. However, part of me thinks that undertaking is a bit much for the scope of the story. My plans for the ship have them traveling between star systems in a few days. Even with that speed, getting to where the big bang occurred wouldn't be in their life time.

There is no "place" where the big bang occurred. The universe began as a microscopic speck that expanded into the entire universe. The last vestige of the big bank is the microwave background radiation that pervades the entire universe. We are, in essence, living in what's left of the big bang.

In the big bang, matter exploded outward. Right now, most galaxies are still spreading outward. So if one was to travel opposite the direction that the galaxies are moving, that would be the direction of the big bang. What if something was left behind by that explosion, something that would shed light on the true nature of the universe? At least, that's one of the ideas I came up with.

The big bang was not an explosion in the usual sense of the word but an expansion of space itself. Physicists have compared it to the surface of a balloon with dots on its surface representing the galaxies. If you blow up the balloon, all the "galaxies" move apart from each other, but there is no one point from which they are all radiating.

To the center of the balloon!

As I said, it was one of the ideas I brain stormed and one I was planning on discarding.

Right now some of my other ideas for what to do with a spaceship are become nice pirates (I watched too much One Piece recently) and get caught up in some sort of galactic war.

The story would start off with some general space exploration. They left Earth with a cool spaceship and they don't know what's out there.

There is no center of the balloon. The universe is represented in 2-D by the surface of the balloon. Good luck with your story, though. Don't mind me; I like to keep my own writing very "hard" science fiction and do a lot of research into the sciences to support that. If everyone wrote like me, we wouldn't have Star Wars.

I try for Babylon 5 levels of "hard". But the universe is a 3D space and from what I learned in Astronomy class, is expanding in all directions, so if you were to track the paths of all the galaxies, there should be a central point at the center of the balloon.

No. The balloon is a 2-D surface simplifying the idea of a 3-D surface. You're thinking of the balloon as a 3-D object, but I'm only speaking of a spherical 2-D surface; there is no inside in this model. In fact, from Earth's point of view, all the galaxies (except for a few local galaxies that are gravitationally bound into the local cluster) are moving away from us. The same would be seen from any other point in space.

Andrea wrote: "I like the aspect of the people from different time periods being pulled into the story in the second option. They would all react to events in very different ways, and given the clothing of differ..."

I know of one idea that was used in a movie that had a little bit of the same idea. all the characters hearing was altered so they always here their personal language. So a Japanese samurai sounded like they spoke English and heard Japanese from everyone else. Their hearing got altered by the thing that brought them all here in the first place.

Jared wrote: "I try for Babylon 5 levels of "hard". But the universe is a 3D space and from what I learned in Astronomy class, is expanding in all directions, so if you were to track the paths of all the galaxie..."

Soft, then.

Well, fairly hard for TV, soft for books.