My ideas:
“The Grievers”
Main character is a homicide detective investigating a serial killer who targets young mothers with young daughters. He is becoming increasingly suicidal because close to a year ago he lost his wife and young daughter when they were hit by a drunk driver. The driver was killed as well, so he’s left with only his job, and for some reason he just latches onto this case with the killer and feels strongly for the victims and he is becoming alcoholic. One day, a woman approaches him and tells him she is his biological mother and has been looking for him. He doesn’t care, he’s already lost so much and already had a family (only parents who have passed on already), one that had adopted him, so he brushes her off and tries to keep on working and trying to find the killer.
His biological mother had given him up at birth and later met a man who she married and had a child with. She had loved her husband and her son, and was very involved in their lives. Her husband had died of natural causes and she had her son…until he was murdered after running with the wrong crowd.
Now she is grieving and has no one left and decided to seek out her biological son that she’d given up and be with him as a mother.
Both are grieving and the mother keeps showing up at a bar the main character frequents as he tries to solve the case and cope with his grief as well. In the end, he solves the case and finally breaks down in a bar with his bio mother holding him as he says, “They’re gone…jesus christ, they’re gone…my girls….oh god….mom….mom, they’re gone, they’re gone…” and his bio mother just holds him, whispering “Shhh, it’s ok, darling…I’m here now, son…” and that’s basically it.
“Time’s Burning”:
Main character named Jake is a young guy whose father is a famous writer and his first novel had been titled “Time’s Burning”. His mother died at a young age, leaving him behind with his father and older brother. Both brothers hate their father, who became alcoholic after his wife died and hated his sons as well. So both boys grew up never reading a single book of their fathers and the older brother makes it as a professional football player and Jake is following in his footsteps as a college player. His older brother shocks the world when he turns down a multi million contract renewal to join the military and fight in the middle east. He becomes MIA and is a POW of terrorists in the middle east as Jake is graduating from his university and the media hype over which professional team he’ll sign with is all over the news when his father dies. Jake is left alone and confused about what to do next in life. He is very good at football as a quarterback, he knows how to read the defense and is a cold, calculating winner but has no real love for the game like his older brother had. He’s not sure if he wants to be a professional football player and the media hype about his older brother, the death of his father, and what Jake himself will do next all over the media just gets to him and he disappears. He is attending a university somewhere on the east coast while he grew up in Oregon, where his father had passed away and he buys a motorcycle and decides to ride it cross country to his father’s funeral, and reads his father’s first novel for the first time in his life and finally begins to feel a connection to his father through the novel. So he travels cross country as the news all across america asks, “Where is Jake ____?” There were rumors that his father had written many other stories that were never published, but they were never found. I’m not sure how to end the story, either Jake arrives at the summer home in Oregon to find his father’s rumored unpublished manuscripts, or he never finds anything and sits at his father’s computer and decides to write his own story, beginning a new life as a writer, I guess. Yeah, I know, the plot with his older brother is unresolved, I don’t know how to deal with that…was thinking about Pat Tillman when I thought it up.
Hmm…got some others, but can’t really recall them right now, lol…
