Pulpy Titles as Starting Points

I've always wanted to write science fiction and fantasy, but only recently had my first success at conceiving of a real story with plot and characters and everything, finishing it, and getting it accepted in an anthology. The story is "Kings of the Corona" and you can (and should!) read it in the anthology TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, edited by Anthony Marchetta. A friend who doesn't use Kindle bought the print edition and showed it to me, and it's very handsome. I was struck by what an excellent gift it would make to some book-lover for Christmas or any other holiday of your choice.

Okay, enough promotion for today. I'm currently working on several writing projects. One is a short story with a working title "The Stowaways" (I hope to rename it eventually) whose first draft I've finished. I'm taking my mind off of that for awhile so I can come back to review and revise it later with a fresh mind: based on how my work went on "Kings of the Corona", it seems to me that a lot of the magic comes in the revising and polishing stage. Meanwhile, I'm also about ready to start manuscript work on a story for Superversive Press's Luna anthology, and I have a pretty long line of other ideas I'm anxious to get cracking on after that.

Then there's this concept from Brad Walker on the Superversive website, of writing serialized fiction on one's blog. I've actually been considering that for awhile, and I'd like to do that too: I hope it would spur me to increase the regularity of both my blogging and my writing.

Where do ideas for good, pulpy SFF stories come from? There's lots of advice out there. One idea is to start with a title and make up a story for it. I decided to experiment with that, and loaded a database with a vocabulary taken from titles of Doc Savage stories, with a few I added myself that I thought had a similar flavor, and set up a routine to combine these at random (though with a few rules) and randomly interspersed with numbers and "of" and "of the". Then I let it crank out some titles.

Most of them were just nonsense, but I kept track of some that seemed interesting:

• The Swords of Saturn
• The Undersea Manhunt
• The Six Magic Moons
• The Poison War
• The Deadly Shadow
• The Mysterious Dimension
• The Two Fantastic Quests
• The Sky Tournaments
• The Disaster Comet
• The Child of Europa
• The Fearsome Labyrinth
• The Future Eagle
• The Crystal Dragon
• The Goblin Star
• The Green Portal
• The Caverns of Io
• The Avenging Pirates
• The Meteors of the Sargasso
• The Midas Ogre
• The Cloud Wizards
• The Fiery Castle
• The Encrypted Arenas
• The Four Suns of Mercury
• The Ocean Ambassadors

There are a lot here that seem suggestive enough that I'd pick them off the stand and thumb through them. "The Four Suns of Mercury"--what's that about? Does some evildoer create a space warp and swipe the whole planet out of the solar system to a new sun, where our heroes give chase and force him to flee to yet another sun, and another? Or could there be miniature artificial suns created to orbit the planet--and for what purpose? Perhaps some extra suns are INSIDE the (surprisingly hollow) planet of Mercury?

Or "The Undersea Manhunt": your fugitive flees in a submarine, in the dark and still mostly-unsettled three-quarters of the globe in the near future. How does the hero catch up with him? What's "The Goblin Star"? Perhaps a tiny white dwarf that's been approaching Sol without our noticing for centuries, and due to pass by shortly--but will the brutish inhabitants of its orbiting planet be content to pass along with it? How the heck can "The Encrypted Arenas" be a thing? Perhaps they're virtual? What's the point of encrypting them? Is something going on in them that the participants need to remain secret?

My evaluation: this is not a bad way to stimulate story ideas. As I say, I already have a longish list of "to-be-worked-ons", but please feel free to take on anything here that strikes your fancy. Maybe leave a comment if you do so I know the title has been done, when I look back on this years later.