The League of Superhero Writers

Who else is writing a superhero novel?

My MC is Theo, a college student who was born with superpowers. He's been keeping them secret all his life, but he also wants to use his powers for good. He dons a mask and becomes the campus protector, roaming the grounds at night and helping people out of trouble. The only one who knows his secret is his best friend and roommate Prue. Through a long and complicated series of events, Theo comes into contact with Quinn, an enigmatic billionaire who specialises in finding superpowered individuals and organising them. Suddenly, Theo's life is full of conspiracy theories and mysterious people in government cars and he's about to find out more about his past than he ever wanted to know.

My main issue right now is that I lack a good villain...

So, what are you writing about and what problems are you facing?

I may write the third in my superhero diary series this year, but haven't quite decided yet. My current problem is that I know exactly the shape of a particular plot point, but it's taking a bugger of an age to figure out the best way for everything to happen. (I am telling myself that this isn't outlining, it's still just notes; this may be a lie.)

I'm not writing it for NaNo, but I have an on hold superhero project. It's about two battling groups of supers and a lot of secrets (I know, I'm terrible at describing story plots).

Lots and lots of superheroes in my novel; I'm kind of having fun with the fact that the main character's power is basically to be a human boggart (didn't think of that particular description until I'd already thought her up), which isn't really a very typical hero power.

I'm writing a superhero novel this year! Though he has no superpowers, he just has a love for comic books and a friend who made awesome gadgets.

My main problem will be coming up with gadgets. I'm hoping I will invent them the moment I need them, but I kinda doubt it. It took me weeks to decide what superpower he has (or rather that he doesn't have any).
Second problem might be him taking over the novel. Because the whole thing is written from the point of his biggest fan who will be at his side for a while. For now all scenes in my head are only with the hero. I already love him way too much.
I admit, I have a thing for broken characters - Cox, House, the Doctor... meow.

I continue to write superhero fiction for Nanowrimo. This time around I will focus my attention on a new team of 4 genetically engineered heroes as they first step in to the world. I have some fun things slowly developing in it.

Does El Zorro count? I'm planning a Zorro novel.

Whoo! Superheros are awesome. My super villain is my protagonist, actually. He's sarcastic and very proper. I'm fond of him. He needs a name... Welp. Well, I guess it'll get there somehow. I'm excited to see how everyone else's plots develop! It's always quite the adventure.

Yep, I'm probably going to write a superhero novel. Try to anyway.

It takes place about a year after a group of people were kidnapped, tortured, and given super powers. Most of them will be come villains (is that believable?). They were freed (it's complicated to explain). The guy responsible (Aiken) is now collecting things to make himself more powerful and to create his own dystopian playground. A superhero with blood manipulation, an eccentric engineer (mad scientist), a colourful girl who likes explosives, and a roguish guy who can manipulate gravity go to stop him. Then there's a huge plot hole that I hope to fill with action and adventure and exciting things. At some point, they'll find out that one of them is a spy. It will also be revealed that some of Aiken's "followers" were manipulating him (they will stab in the back, figuratively speaking) and that his evil genius/mad scientist is the real Big Bad (Silas). Then there's another huge plot hole while they go after Silas. Then I am confused about how it ends.
Wow I need to figure out what goes in those plot holes.

Yay! I love villain protagonists! I also like heroes with gadgets. :)

I've got a superhero novel in the works. It's centered around a high school girl who discovers she has superpowers and follows her as she masters them and helps to lock away a supervillain who threatens the safety of superheroes and their families everywhere. My biggest worry that it might be to much on the light side and will lack some of the seriousness that typically follows some of the more mature superhero stories.

Mine is about the dawn of superpowered people on Earth, and the subsequent confusion, panic, and path to heroism of one girl who's been chosen to wield huge amounts of power and ensure balance is kept.

I don't know what she's going to pick as a codename yet, but considering that she'll be picking it with her trigger-happy nonpowered-but-determined-to-help best friend and a nerdy powered teenager, they will probably all have ridiculous names. :P

I'm writing a superhero plot. Except it's more a parody of your regular superhero plot, but it still counts! I don't have any names set out yet, but I have a general gist of the plot (humour galore, I do believe). I've always been absolutely terrible with naming - I'll probably be wandering in and out of the adoption area a lot, ahaha.

As for superpowers... well, one of my MCs doesn't have any (but everyone is convinced she does). The rest are just your run-of-the-mill powers - strength, speed, intelligence, eating one hundred hamburgers in the space of a minute...

Evil Overlord List here I come!

One of my plots I'm juggling with this year has do with superheroes.
More like a team of non-powered heroes, they're all kind of mentally unbalanced, but in different ways. Anyways, scratch 'hero' and put 'vigilante' on there. The only 'villain' in the plot would be either a gang that they managed to upset or the police.

Catch is... the team members all work in the same office as their day job.

Joining, since my most stuck -on-my-brain idea that isn't a Criminal Minds fanfic is about a Superman-esque hero, if Superman had come to Earth as an adult soldier instead of an infant, with a biomechanical cavalry beast.

His name on Earth is Nick de Comte, but he's not anywhere near the kind of powers as Superman. Most of Nick's capability as a hero comes from Destroyer, his beast and partner, and alien armor and infantry weaponry. I know there'll be a conversation in the story with him complaining about unrealistic Superman is compared to what all the alien species he knows are really like, since in his world the Kryptonians would have invaded Earth because they have superpowers here and annihilated the Human race.

I chose an initial genre of Sci-Fi, might change it to Adventure based on how the story develops. What genres did everybody else put?

This is my first NaNoWriMo, and I'll be donning the spandex mantle and writing what is, hopefully, a tight superhero yarn.

My story takes place in the not-too-distant future, after an event called the Power Surge, wherein overnight every man, woman and child on Earth was suddenly granted a superpower, by means as yet unknown to them. Sudden chaos erupted as, across the globe, men and women now granted with miraculous power began committing crimes, waging wars, forming vigilante groups, fighting against former governments, and letting the darker side of their natures, brought to light by their powers, emerge. Nine years later, parts of the world have gained some semblance of order. In America and other former first-world nations, local city governments have been able to organize militias of the most powerful Talents [the term in my universe for superheroes] available, and uneasy peace is restored.

Top among the Talented is Carroll, a psychic with the power to project his consciousness into any organic structure. Working as a "Talent Scout" (read: detective) for Chicago's elite Superhuman Intelligence Force, he is tasked with scouting out potential threats to the reestablished civil order.

Sent on a routine scout mission into a power plant hijacked by third-rate "supervillains," Carroll arrives to find the threat terminated, and the would-be terrorists horrifically murdered. What's more, among their mangled ranks he finds a corpse which looks identical to his own, living body.

From here the story will spiral into a whirlwind of intrigue, mystery, and superpowered goodness as Carroll searches to uncover the mysteries behind this and other mysterious incidents around the globe. Readers who stick with me will be led through Cambodian jungles filled with living tree-men superheroes, under the ocean to the abode of a subterranean race of squid people, and to space itself as Carroll matches wits with an enigmatic murderer known only as "The Sun King." Through it all, he will search for the secret to saving humanity from an impending evil, and discover the cause of the mysterious Power Surge which has so affected and afflicted the world.

* * *
Thus far I have a really solid working knowledge of how want the plot to go, I know how I want the mystery to work out, I know what I want the villains to be like and what powers they should have, and I have a good grasp of Carroll's character and the personalities of the other main characters. What I'm having trouble with is thinking up really unique powers and Talent names for some of the minor characters. I want to make the distribution of superpowers really random, where some people have Superman-like ultra abilities, whereas others have really stupid or useless powers, like being able to convert any solid object into mayonnaise or something. Finding clever powers for background characters is giving me some trouble.

I'm planning on trying my hand at a superhero story this year.

The basic idea is that the world knows about people with superpowers, and there re two major rival colleges that teach people with powers how to use them. One is for Heroes and the other for Villains. My MC wants to be a good guy, but he pretty much stinks at being good. So he's going to the Villain college on scholarship. It's pretty much his college life, falling in love, trying to pass Into to Mad Science, and dealing with being given an arch-enemy that should have probably been a Villain.

Looking for some support here, am I the only one who can come up with the hero's real name, his entire circle, his backstory, and yet suck donkey at inventing his enemies and choosing a public name for his heroing?

Nick's original concept has his heroing identity as the "Night Stalker." I kinda sorta don't like it, but I have a tendency to suck at coming up with supernames at times. Hit some generators and the only real good option I got was "Xenoclad" almost everything else was in something-person format I definitely didn't want. Opinions?

In your stories, are there fictional superheroes as well as real ones? Do people read comic books about Superman and Spiderman? Are you making this a part of the story? Or are you taking the Watchmen road where another genre has taken the place of superhero stories because superheroes exist in the real world?

My MC:s best friend is a massive nerd who loves comic books. I'm planning to use this to lighten up the story with her constantly referencing her fictional heroes to take the edge off the dark and tortured brooding the rest of the characters are so fond of. It's hard to be properly angsty when someone just compared you to Batman and suggested you make your sidekicks wear short shorts and pixie boots. Then again, my heroes aren't the cape-and-spandex type, just people with powers.

I'm not doing it for Nano since I already started but I'm doing a rewrite of my first story. It's a young adult superhero/coming of age story about a girl named Haley, a Marvel and DC comic book fan who lives in a world where superpowers exist but are rare, and people do wear tights to commit or stop crimes. Everybody who does this has a secret identity, an important plot point. But nobody calls them "heroes" or "villains," because it sounds too much like fiction. Everybody calls them costumes or capes.

While at the general store in July, Haley nearly gets killed by some lava (long story) but is saved by a costume named Arctana and she decides she wants to be part of the "costume community." Like any superhero story there's some resentment of that part of town. That's the prologue. The rest of the story is set during her school year where her school gets attacked and she realizes someone at her school must be a costume so she tries to solve the mystery. Soon after, she discovers the secret identities of two of her heroic classmates, Clara Fernandez and Patrick . . . something. I'm still deciding. She makes Clara let her help solve the mystery, but along the way she comes to find that things aren't so black and white (even if she technically knew that from reading comics) but that costumes, even the "heroic" types have shades of gray and that powers don't really make the hero.

I know, lame and uninspiring idea.

Well I just spend a couple of hours exploring Superhero Nation, and I have some new insights for Nick's character, and I'm trying to make my tech details for his equipment. I'm adding a little problem with fuel cells as a limiter, and difficulty in re-charging and replacing them here on Earth. Which is the primary reason his day job is as the personal assistant for tech millionaire businesswoman Jordan Harris, it gives him access to Harris Industries for equipment.

And I've mentally tweaked his boss Jordan's personality, she's still a hard-charging self-made millionaire businesswoman, but I've thrown some weekend party-hard on top of it. This was inspired by:

Who else has seen the new Avengers movie trailer? Looks like it'll be good, even though God only knows when it'll be at the theater here in Italy.

Has anybody decided who if anyone knows their hero's secret identity if he has one? Jordan will eventually, at first she knows Atlal and about his mission and the Rishan Empire, she won't find out until later that he's also her put-upon personal assistant. I think I can easily do this without forcing Jordan to be stupid, which she definitely isn't.