The new new thing

Sometimes I think I have more fun thinking up my next idea for a story, rather than actually, you know, finishing my current story.

I'm not abandoning the NT, and I'm not stuck, and it's not even that I've reached a point where I don't know what to do next. But a few months ago, or maybe last year some time, a neat idea for something new popped into my head, percolated up in there for a while, and then went away. For some reason, this past weekend it came back.

All that's there right now is an idea: I was imaging a world with only children left in it. All the adults are gone, and there's no reason why. There was no war, no plague, no disaster. The protagonist simply wakes up one morning to discover that her parents are gone.

There are hints and some clues in the few scenes that I've had bubbling in my head: a grieving argument between her parents, the night before they vanished, that she wasn't meant to have heard; dreams or visions of her lost brother trying to tell her something important; small scenes of survival.

I think it's a pretty neat idea, but I'm not quite sure what to do with it -- or whether to do something with it. Survival stories and stories of societal breakdown are grim enough; make the survivors into children and it might be too dark and dreary even for me, and I do tend to pile on the grime occasionally.

We'll see what happens. If I get stuck in the NT for real some time, I might just start writing something, and see where it takes me.