I happened to look through the notes I have stored on my computer, and came across some ideas I'd like to work on in future, but I'm kind of stuck as to how these stories should resolve themselves. Some are pretty thought-provoking and I'd have to be careful how I ended them. I fear that for some of them, a downbeat ending might be required, which likely would not go over well here. Some thoughts about where I might go with these ideas would be appreciated.

As for the Christmas contest story, well...after talking to rebecca.a, who graciously offered to edit it for me, I probably am not going to upload it as an entry for the contest, and perhaps post it some other time. Maybe even as far forward as next Christmas. I've kind of gotten stuck, as I've tried to decide if I should scrap what I've done and start over.

You see, I realized I have the makings of a novel, not a short story, and if I'm to do a novel, the characters are going to have to be more fully developed. It's one of those stories that could be great if I had six months, and not a few days. I have the choice of doing it right, or doing it fast, and I think I'd rather do it right.

Anyway, these are some of the story ideas I happened to uncover, all of them with an age-regression theme, which I tend to specialize in. The last of these, incidentally, I'd already suggested elsewhere in considerably altered form, but I think I like this earlier version of my idea better:

UNTITLED AGE-REGRESSION STORY: In an unspecified future time, for the lucky few with money, those who are terminally ill have the chance to have a second life by having their memory engrams encoded onto a hard drive and downloaded into a new body. Trouble is, the demand is high and the waiting list long, so our desperate friend agrees to the first new body available--six-month-old Rebekah Chasen, the victim of an auto accident, and currently in a coma without much chance of recovery. The whole deal isn't quite on the up-and-up--the man was so desperate he felt compelled to bribe the proper bureaucrats to obtain little Rebekah's body. Delighted the procedure worked, our protagonists basks in the comfort and love of his newly-gained second infancy, until his memories fade and he's like any other child.

Fast forward five years: he loves his new family, who provided him with the love and support he failed to receive in his first childhood. But he didn't count on having his original memories return. When they do, he's overcome by guilt and shame for the way he obtained that life, especially when he uncovers clues that the original Rebekah might not have been brain-dead after all. Making him, naturally, an accessory to a murder.

So he's faced with a choice--does he tell who he really is? And if, in the unlikely event he's believed, what would they do to him? No plan had ever been put forward to handle this contingency--the confidentiality agreement and the threat of reprisal was enough to intimidate most people. But what form would reprisal take? It isn't as if he could be jailed as he is, a five and a half-year-old. And how can he clear his conscience without hurting the Chasens, whom he loves?

IMAGE 57: An ordinary, married heterosexual male, age 30, returning from a vacation in the Cayman Islands, discovers a strange image on his camera when he reviews his vacation photos: a preteen girl who bears a strange resemblance to him, as if she were a long-lost daughter or younger sister. Poring over hundreds of images, he sees the girl in roughly half of them--curiously, he also notices his complete absence from the photo library. The girl stands in places where he could have sworn he himself had been. Unknown to him, various alternate realities are folding in on themselves, like an origami flower, and with every fold, he loses more and more of himself....

GLITCH: An recently-unemployed bus driver goes to bed as a 35-year-old man and wakes up as a seven-year-old girl, in a gender-switched version of his old bedroom. A younger version of his mother is in the kitchen cooking breakfast for her "daughter." Before our confused protagonist can scream, the background unzips and "she" is whisked away to some place called the Central Processor, where a computer geek type is fuming about a hacking attempt.

It seems our universe is nothing but a massive, multifaceted mainframe computer program, like The Matrix but far less stable. Second, a significant portion of the lives of tens of millions had been either altered, wiped out, or both, with no record at all of any event beyond the year 1984. No 9-11, no Iraq or Afghanistan war, no fall of the Soviet Union, no Tiananmen Square protest. More to the point, no hero--at least, not as he'd been before this inexplicable disaster. Though the program has wiped out a large chunk of history, it does not completely wipe out the memories of those who lived through it--all the individuals who were changed are aware of their former lives in varying degrees.

The geek and his team of programmers are working frantically to retrieve information to no avail, and resign themselves to the fact that they're going to have to tell designated people what's happened to their lives, and act as a sort of guardian angel (in their words, a "facilitator") to help them get acclimated to their new reality. A rogue programmer plugged in a string of bad code which cut a swath through the last thirty years or so of our history, making some interesting "alterations" in the case of our hero. The start of a possible new universe, as a different facilitator works with a different victim whose reality has been weirdly warped.

The first of the three stories is especially challenging, as it's a moral dilemma that I can't simply resolve by having the protagonist sacrifice his/her life in some way. That would hurt the adoptive family too, and I wouldn't want to end it that way.

I also found a segment originally intended for the reconciliation-story contest, which I've been working on sporadically in addition to the Christmas story. Whether I'll preview it, as I did with the Christmas story, I don't know yet.

Any comments anyone might have about the above ideas, and what direction I might take them, would be welcome.