| CONCEPT
IMAGES Please select a page: |
 |
Images are thumbnails of larger images. Click on the "Full Size" link beneath each image to see the big one. |
Before you view these images, I want to make one thing clear: These are "posters" for stories that I never, ever intended to write, and I still do not intend to write them. They are what the title of this page indicates: Concept Graphics for Stories That Were Never Written. If you write me and ask me to write these stories, I will ignore your email completely. As a general rule, any graphic that has my name on it indicates a story that at least went to the outline stage before being abandoned. Stories that have no author name might have originally been conceived as a Dawson or a Bandit novel. You can usually figure it out from reading the blurb text on the image. |
| Flashback was a story idea that I had somewhere around the time that ELS finished and I was starting up my Bandit phase. I decided not to write the story for a pile of reasons, and instead concentrated the "bleak" story threads into the Bandit stuff. You'll notice that the tagline "The deadliest betrayal is someone you trust," makes little (if any) grammatical sense. My editor, Scott Carr, and I go through rounds and rounds of emails over the wording of the posters. I insist that it's OK to break some of the rules of composition in "advertising," and he insists that rules are rules. Mulder is yellow in this image to suggest fear, as in "yellow-bellied." |
|
| Exceptional Clearence is actually the title of a novel by another author, William J. Caunitz; The plot of that novel is about how the NYPD sometimes uses higher-ranking officers to command small, elite units dedicated to quietly handling crimes involving high-profile criminals such as politicians and so forth. I wanted to steal the title because the word "Clearance," when used in police circles, means "case closed," but when applied to the XF universe, it meant a security clearence, which would give Mulder access to the information he's always seeking. The plot I envisioned was that he somehow managed to get access to the CIA's files. Portions of my idea were used in Redux I and Redux II, although the idea for the story predated those episodes by about six months. The CIA Seal shown in this graphic is authentic, BTW. | |
| General Quarters is another story that sprang from my Umbra novel. I loved the idea of Mulder aborard a nuclear submarine that was about to start WWIII. Yes, it feels like a steal from the movie Crimson Tide, and I'm sure that movie had more than a little influence on my thoughts, but I really liked the idea of Mulder saving the world. This idea will come into play again and again in my writing, so you might as well get used to it. <G> | |
| Like any good soap opera fan (I was hooked on Days of Our Lives while recovering from a knee injury a dozen or so years ago,) I like the idea of character amnesia. I had always wanted to write a good, hard amnesia-based story around Mulder or Scully, but I kept running up against the Soap Opera Wall. I remember reading one where Scully has amnesia, and she falls in love with Mulder, and she remembers the reality of their former relationship in the middle of making love. Melodramatic to the extreme, and I just didn't find a way to make the story "real" in my mind. And the amnesia storyline is always jucier when they're on the run, dodging malefactors left and right. | |
| Discovery was a story that I actually announced. The original concept was that Mulder would be arrested for being an assassian, and only Scully would be able to save him from being convicted by testifying in open court that they were together the night of the murder, in bed, making love. The idea was that the fact they were lovers would never be even hinted at during the early part of the story, and the entire thing would turn on her testimony. "Discovery" is a legal term that refers to the phrase of a criminal trial where both sides have to share all the evidence they plan to use at trial with each other. Time pressures dictated that the story be abandoned. | |
| When I was deep inside ELS, and having a blast writing Profiler!Mulder, I thought of a series of short stories surrounding his profiling days at Quantico. Not being a strict Mulderist (I see myself as more of a Scullyist,) I realized that not having Scully in the plot would make it boring for me to write. So, I hit on the idea of having Scully being "chosen" by a serial killer (later used in the final chapters of ELS,) and Mulder using his powers as a profiler to deduce that she was in trouble. It's only the most basic "Woman in Jep" plot, as was pointed out to me by some other fanfic writers that I approached as a sounding board. But, when coming up with the story, I had the idea for this graphic, which shows a tiny image of Scully in Mulder's eye. | |
| This is another graphic for Flashback, a
variation on the proposed Forgotten storyline, that of Mulder
waking from a coma and having Scully on his tail trying to kill him. The idea was that
Scully would have been convinced, somehow, that a body she was shown was Mulder, and when
she sees the real Mulder back from his coma, she automatically assumes it's some kind of
Project/Consortium plot, and having had enough, goes off the reservation and after him. The image of Mulder that appears in this graphic is one that I use again and again with various digital techniques. For some reason, it's a very appealing graphic, and lends itself to various concepts very easily, as you will see in some graphics below. |
|
| Point Blank was an idea that just never bared fruit. It sort of did in a Dawson story called "Secrets and Truths." This was done basically to test the visual image of the crosshairs with the half-full zoomed split. I saw it on the cover of a paperback in Borders one day, and wanted to see if I could make it work. | |
| A variation on Discovery, this story was also
never written because, basically, courtroom stories involve a LOT of dialog that has to be
specific and true, otherwise I hear it from lawyers. Inquest generated a lot of mail, both
positive and negative, but most indicated that the judge in that story would have had a
hard time pulling off what I had him do, and I just didn't want to face the legal research
to support this idea: Mulder pleads not-guilty to a charge of murder on the basis of
temporary insanity. Scully knows what happened, and she's hiding a secret of her own. The graphic is effective, I think, because Mulder has had a "Wind" effect applied to him, which makes him look etheral and...spooky (forgive me.) Scully, on the other hand, looks professional, crisp, clean and in color. The contrast brings the image of the story to the forefront, that Mulder, "looming large" in Scully's life, is so important to her that she'll risk her career for him (again!). |
|
| As you can see by the graphic, Wipe was a story that
XFBandit was going to put out. (I thought I had put it out, and I've lost any copies that
I might own, and a Deja search returned nada -- if I did issue this, and someone has a
copy, PLEASE send me one!) The idea was that Mulder would use chaos theory to link ALL the conspiracies together using some heavy-duty math, and at the moment of his discovery, he's kidnapped by the Consortium, spirited away and has his memory zapped. (Like in the episode Deep Throat.) Only this time, Scully was with him, and is told to sit by her phone and await word. The story is really about Scully, and how she spends the week he's away by the phone and going through his apartment looking for clues. The Mulder!Face used in this one is the same original image that was used in Flashback and Exceptional Clearance. |
|
| Ok, this one is an obvious rip off of the plot and the
poster for Face/Off, the John Woo-directed actioner starring
John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. But, ya gotta admit, if a fanfic author had come up with the idea first, it would have been a great story! Sort of what like Bandit would have done with the basic plot idea of Small Potatos, wherein someone can masquerade as Mulder without Scully's knowledge, and he turns out to be a killer. |
|
