I’m kicking around ideas for potential books, comics or graphic novels. I haven’t yet decided on the medium, but for now I’m mostly working on the stories themselves and the visual development.

 

The Fish That Sang:

Based on a dream I had when I was eight. The story is about a princess and a prince, who are betrothed to wed but can’t stand each other. The day before their wedding, the prince accidentally offends a fairy, who punishes him by transforming him into a fish and leaving him in the princess’s pond.
Now privy to the princess’s private world, the prince learns about the princess and grows to care for her.
She often sings by herself, and one evening the prince joins her in a duet. Realising that her partner is a fish, the princess befriends him. Ashamed of his previous cruelty towards her, the prince pretends he is merely an ordinary fish who has been charmed by a fairy.
He claims to know the prince’s whereabouts, and ultimately the princess and the fish go on a journey to the fairy realm together to restore the prince to humanity.

Contemplating writing this as a novel, with illustrations interspersed through the book.

 

 

 

Unicorn Girl (not final title):

An idea inspired by an ignorant post on tumblr that read “virgins are rarer than unicorns”.
In this story, set in the modern day (likely in Sydney or an American city; haven’t decided), a dejected 21 year old girl – who has never even been kissed – discovers on her 21st birthday that, due to still being a virgin, is entitled to a team of unicorns and incredible unicorn powers.
The story follows her comedic struggles with sharing her tiny apartment with the many unicorns, her journey to learn the scope and potential of her new powers, her decision to use her powers to fight crime, and the trials that come with trying to keep your new superhero activities a secret.
A new problem comes up – she finally meets the man of her dreams, only to find that she can only keep her powers if she remains a virgin; she cannot even hold hands or kiss her new beau, as such intimacy can affect her powers.
Mostly an exploration of the value placed on virginity in our society, and the paradox that while virgin women are valued over “loose” women, virgins are often made to feel ashamed of their lack of experience and relative rarity as they get older.
Would work well in graphic format as a superhero comic or graphic novel.

 

 

Insomnia:

An idea for another story taking place in the same world as Unicorn Girl; where Unicorn Girl deals with unicorns and their place in the world, Insomnia deals with vampires and fairies – two creatures touched on but not deeply explored in Unicorn Girl.

Insomnia is about a girl, around the same age as the main character in Unicorn Girl, who finds out that she is a changeling – a fairy swapped at infancy with a human child, who was taken back to the Fairy Realm.
Suddenly all her problems make sense. She is not a light-sensitive albino with a million allergies, odd abilities, and a bizarre sleeping pattern after all; she is, in fact, a fairy – a nocturnal creature that possesses magic powers.
However, her problems are not over yet.
An outsider in both the human and fairy worlds, she has nowhere to fit in, and must deal with the reality that she was essentially created to be discarded.
And worse, the human infant she was swapped with – now a dangerously powerful vampire as a result of being raised in the Fairy Realm – has begun stalking her…

The story deals with themes such as bullying, feeling like an outsider, racism, and growing up in a world that seems against you.