Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Challenge PLOT BUNNY ALERT!

I’ve been battling for a very long time against this infernal animal. I wanted to put it in the back burner till I felt ready to do it justice myself, but it’s been eating at me out of house and brain until I had to capitulate and put it up for adoption.

Lois Lane, at forty, has it all. After more than ten years of marriage, she’s madly in love with her husband, she has beautiful children and a lovely home. She’s slowly reconciling with her parents. Her career is at an all-time high with her Pulitzer prize as well as being a best selling novelist. The happy, whole, maternal and carefree Lois Lane here is vastly different from the one we know.
Until she’s the target of an assassination attempt which, though it fails, leaves her in a coma for three months and she wakes up with no memory of the past fourteen years. Worse, given the record of her previous head traumas, the doctors think it’s unlikely her memory will ever return to her fully.
For Lois, it’s a Rip Van Winkle nightmare. She’s married to a man she last remembers as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie reporter who was foisted on her by Perry a few months ago. She’s apparently turned into her worst nightmare: a soccer mom. Her children are a responsibility which terrifies and confuses her, but which she can’t shy away from as they obviously need her to be a mother to them. She has strangers from all walks of life who know her better than she knows herself, and claim to be her friends. Her father is back in her life. Jimmy Olsen is a veteran foreign correspondent with more experience as a journalist than she remembers having. Her entire world has become a terrifyingly idyllic place to live in. She has a lifetime to start over from scratch.
And worst of all, everyone expects her to take the place of the woman she never knew she could have become, and who she knows she will never again be.
The only familiar aspect of her life seems to be that someone is still trying to kill her for reasons she has no clue about.
And why is her husband being so secretive?
Her investigation begins to implicate a conspiracy of international proportions, which leads her to a secret underground organization called Westgate. And the key to finding out how she is involved in all of this lies in tracking down it’s ring leader; an elusive figure known simply as - Madame.

Okay, so now that I’ve done the teaser trailer, is there anybody out there willing to write the actual story? I have it nearly all mapped out but writing fiction is not my forte.
Note: I ran into a seemingly abandoned WIP called Future Perfect a few weeks ago that had an uncanny resemblance to my story, although the implication in that was that Lois had journeyed through time. This is not the case in my premise, it’s a bit more Bourne Identity than that, and I assure you this premise was conceived of months before I’d read it. I suppose that great minds think alike!

Hasini, this would be *SOOOO* good. I am dying to read it already. Unfortunately I don't have it in me to write it, but we've got some authors around here who could really do justice to your idea (and you know who you are!).

Hasini has another fabulous idea!

Andreia

What do you mean, Lisa?

Btw, thanks for the enthusiasm.

OMG Hasini! Someone has to write this! It's a terribly fascinating idea! Your teaser was brilliant, and I had to say this line really, really struck me:

And then, of course, I died laughing at this:

I hope you or someone's able to write this!!

Sara

I would really love to see this. It sounds brilliant. I know there are stories somewhat similar to it floating around but nothint to this scale and nothing with this take on it. I would give it a read. ^_~

I meant there are some authors who would really excel at this, but I didn't want to put them on the spot by naming them.

Jenni Debbage's 'The Forgotten' deals with this premise (and a lot more ) - only it's Clark who has the amnesia. He's about the same age as Hasini is proposing, he and Lois have children, etc.

c.

Not really. I've read "The Forgotten", (LOVED it!) but what I'm thinking about is completely different. It's not just about having amnesia, really, the plot centers on being surrounded by ones you whom loved and trusted the most, in another life you don't remember, and being able to trust nobody. It's a bit of a whodunit thriller, really, with a lot of angst. Think Bourne Identity.
Also, it's imperative that it's Lois centric.
I think it's really unfair that the gods should inflict fully-formed plot bunnies like this on a person who so obviously can't write them.

Sounds like a great story idea. A few years ago, I actually read about a woman in a similar circumstances. She required brain surgery and when she woke up, she had no memory of the past 20 years.

That's okay. You're a wonderful muse, Hasini. (Think FB).

Actually it sounds like Hasini has more to go on this time. With Faustian all she gave me was "buddy sex" and the premise that maybe it wouldn't go as smoothly as they hoped.

I wonder. I don't know much about retrograde amnesia, but it seems usually, the only things people forget are personal stuff, stuff that they experienced, rather than the names of presidents and how to work a computer. So would that mean that Lois would know how to operate a cell phone in 2007, as cell phones hadn't really caught on in 1993 (the year she last remembers living in), esp not ones with the sorts of features we have today?

It's an interesting premise - I did a bit of very superficial research on this topic for a fic I wrote a fic a few years ago, and I gather it really depends on the part(s) of the brain that are damaged. Maybe there are some folcs out there whose RL experience in biology, psychology, health care could help with the brain chemistry bits?

The other thing is the trust issue - you'd have to find a plausible explanation for why Lois would feel she couldn't trust anyone.

Wayne Gretsky's father suffered a stroke which left him with amnesia - as far as I know he never did recover his memories of his personal life. What he did retain, though, is the skill sets he had. A lack of trust of those around him doesn't seem to have been an issue at all, though, in his case.

c.

Oh my. All the ingredients of my very favourite plot themes. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. I've been known to watch episodes of TV shows I normally detest if that's the plot of the week. I've always been fascinated by the notion of suddenly not being able to trust the people you should be able to absolutely.

Someone write this! Quick!

LabRat

It's cause there's a lot of things going on that nobody is quite sure how to tell her how about, so everybody is holding things back from her, especially Clark.
And as for the other reason...well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

I think, generally, having lost your entire life and memory of it would just make you naturally suspicious anyway. Not to mention a little paranoid. You suddenly have no reference points of your own, you're entirely at the mercy of what other people tell you about yourself, about your history, about your relationships, about who you are and what kind of person you are and have been.

For someone as cynical and suspicious as Lois, who in her earliest incarnation wasn't the most trusting person to begin with, I can easily see why she would find this disorientating and hard to accept.

LabRat

Oh, I totally agree, LabRat.

I would try to say something about psychological issues (I used to work with psychiatric patients), but since I haven't been sleeping well and have obviously been not typing quite right (never mind), I'd probably end up not making any sense.

Oh my goodness. This would definitely be a must-read for me!

As for coming up with a whole plot without being able to write--that's how "Darkest Dreams" started out for me. I set it out as a challenge, but eventually just decided to tackle it myself, though I had no writing experience whatsoever. Why don't you give it a try? I think you'd surprise yourself on what you can do! You came up with it on your own, after all.

<looks around hopefully for someone to accept the challenge>

SmirkyRaven

Well, as for not having written a fic before, well neither had Margaret Mitchell before Gone With the Wind. Although you shouldn't try and emulate in the fact that she never wrote anything after, either. We'd come after you with pitch forks!
But I CAN'T write...