There’s an offshoot of NaNoWriMo called Script Frenzy, where you write a 20,000 script in one month, that I’m thinking of participating in. I’ve got a big budget zombie movie in the back of my head, but I think it deserves a less slapdash treatment than this contest promotes.

Instead, I’m thinking about this modern fantasy story about an average-seeming, kinda slackerish, shlubby guy who uses ritual-style magic to combat supernatural evil in the big city. His friends think he’s off-kilter, but all the weird stories he tells them are absolutely true.

Anyway, I’m thinking that he’d be tracking down an evil artifact of some sort that corrupts anyone who touches it to do vile, nasty stuff in keeping with their baseline personalities. An evil book is a little too Evil Dead, but it fits the concept because it would let people with no magical training find spells they could wreak havoc with.

I’ve got the magic system pretty well worked out. It’s based on the idea that manipulating the symbol of a thing affects the thing symbolized. Obviously, that’s not original with me. It’s subtle magic, more on the lines of probability manipulation than throwing fireballs.

So, anyway, the guy stumbles into an attempted human sacrifice and rescues the girl, but the evildoer gets away. So the hero starts tracking him down. But he doesn’t know that the artifact is choosing its ownership, getting itself stolen or lost, on the lookout for people who can cause the most damage. So, obviously, tracking down a particular person won’t help a whole lot if he doesn’t get there in time. Meanwhile, the girl is a potential love interest, and sticks with him both because she thinks he can keep her safe and because she wants to know what the heck is going on, which lets me explain to the audience what’s going on. The artifact has its own goals as well, beyond mayhem for mayhem’s sake, but I’m not sure what those are yet.

So, like, Constantine meets Clerks.

Not a lot of special effects, no huge sets, shoot mostly on location in any urban area, hijinks, lojinks, relatively small cast, end of the world. Sound like fun?

What do you think, sirs?