IDEAS TODAY. A BIGGER TOMORROW.
Words · By C.S Smith

Words.

Some worlds are ready to enter.
Others are still being imagined.

The finished manuscripts

Complete

Meet What The Fables ↗

Completed manuscripts in the What The Fables collection. Publication and availability will be announced here.

Nun from Mars by C.S Smith — cover art
Cosmic comedy · Faith & first contact

Nun from Mars

An accident in an Italian convent exposes Sister Helen’s secret: she is a refugee from Mars. Her account of a remarkably familiar Martian gospel sends the Vatican into a theological crisis—and two worlds toward a confrontation neither is ready for.

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Healaga has found a home among the Sisters of Perpetual Grace. When her disguise fails, the sisters must decide whether to fear the stranger in their midst or protect the woman they already know. Irreverent humor opens into a story about refuge, belief, and compassion on an interplanetary scale.

The Last Door by C.S Smith — cover art
Supernatural fiction · Grief & wonder

The Last Door

Beneath an Egyptian pyramid, archaeologist Miriam Vale opens a doorway to heaven and finds the brother she buried twelve years ago. The reunion she has longed for carries a danger that could unravel both worlds.

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An impossible discovery brings Miriam face to face with her family’s past and the people she thought she had lost forever. But the ancient portal is failing. To protect the living and the dead, she must confront the cost of certainty—and the possibility of saying goodbye again.

Tree Glidin by C.S Smith — cover art
Ecological mystery · Dry humor

Tree Glidin

Forests start gliding across the world, and farmer Calder Rusk’s crops disappear beneath uninvited trees. A scientist and a relentless reporter join him to uncover the technology, corporate secrets, and human greed behind the impossible migration.

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Dr. Iona Saye investigates the moving root systems while Nessa Venn follows the money to technology giant Hoodies. Together with Calder, they face a crisis threatening farms and food supplies. Scientific intrigue, stubborn rural humor, and an unexpected romance take root in the same disrupted landscape.

What in the Topeka? by C.S Smith — cover art
Future comedy · Fish out of water

What in the Topeka?

Earl Haskett wakes two hundred years in the future—with his entire house and six unlicensed chickens. Topeka has become a glittering metropolis where almost everything has improved except common sense.

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With city guide Mina Vale, Earl navigates breakfast cubes, intrusive conveniences, and the grief of losing the world he knew. His homemade breakfasts build an unlikely community, while an influencer sees a business opportunity. Old skills and new technology collide in a comedy about finding a place to belong.

The Maple Effect by C.S Smith — cover art
Speculative satire · Memory & identity

The Maple Effect

At 6:42 a.m., Canada forgets maple syrup. As livelihoods, traditions, and family memories begin to unravel, neuroscientist Élodie Caron investigates a catastrophe that an unknown intelligence calls an improvement.

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Élodie and a syrup-producing family discover that sensory experiences can briefly recover what vanished. Their search becomes a confrontation with outsiders determined to optimize human life. Beneath the national absurdity is a personal story about grief, imperfect memories, and who gets to decide what matters.

The next possibilities

In Progress

17 concepts

Working titles, developing worlds, and stories on the horizon.

Mary and Her Crumbs

Story concept · In development

The Muffin Man falls in love with Mary Poppins. His devotion becomes a bittersweet story of memory, regret, and the life behind a familiar rhyme.

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Arthur Crumb, the legendary Muffin Man of Drury Lane, falls deeply in love with Mary Poppins. His persistence, rejection, and devotion become intertwined with his baking, until Mary realizes the depth of her own feelings only after it is too late. Arthur's recipes, notebooks, bakery, and philosophy survive through his descendants, while Mary preserves his memory in the rhyme that becomes "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" A bittersweet romance about love, regret, memory, and the strange way a human life can become folklore.

The Fairy-Tale / Nursery-Rhyme Universe

Story concept · In development

Familiar fairy tales conceal a forgotten history. An interconnected anthology traces the real lives and events that became childhood folklore.

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An anthology universe built on the idea that familiar fairy tales and nursery rhymes were once real people and events whose histories became distorted into children's stories over generations. Individual tales can reconstruct the forgotten lives behind figures such as the Muffin Man, Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, Little Red Riding Hood, Bo-Peep, Cinderella, Goldilocks, the Three Blind Mice, and many others. Stories can overlap through recurring families, objects, locations, and consequences, creating a much larger hidden history beneath folklore.

The Purple Egg Pandemic

Story concept · In development

Eggs around the world turn purple without explanation. An everyday food becomes the center of a global crisis of science, fear, and trust.

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Chicken eggs around the world suddenly begin appearing purple, with no immediate scientific explanation. Fear spreads faster than knowledge: people stop eating eggs, governments and scientists investigate, misinformation flourishes, and industries dependent on eggs begin to feel the consequences. The story explores how modern society reacts when something ordinary becomes inexplicably unfamiliar and potentially dangerous, turning a bizarre biological mystery into a study of science, panic, trust, and global interdependence.

The Brilliant Mind's Downfall

Story concept · In development

A gifted man struggles with schizophrenia and addiction as he tries to recover the person he remembers being. A psychological tragedy about identity and loss.

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A gifted person struggles with a brain that can produce extraordinary visions and ideas but is also capable of destroying him. After his brain chemistry changes and schizophrenia takes hold, he becomes obsessed with recovering the person he once was, turning to pills and eventually drugs in an attempt to bring the visions back. Relapse, addiction, damaged relationships, and worsening mental illness create a cycle in which the very mind that made him brilliant also threatens his future. The story is a psychological tragedy about identity, mental illness, and the terror of losing one's own mind.

The Role-Reversed World

Story concept · In development

Earl wakes in a world where heterosexual people are the minority. His bewildering journey challenges his prejudices through comedy, empathy, and love.

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An extremely Christian, Larry-the-Cable-Guy-esque man (Earl) who comically insists that being gay is somehow wrong goes to sleep and wakes in a world where homosexuality is the social norm and heterosexual people are the minority. Horrified and confused, he races around his neighborhood encountering same-sex couples and inventing ridiculous expressions for what he sees. Beneath the comedy, his experience gradually forces him through confusion, empathy, acceptance, and ultimately love. When he returns to his original world, he has become enthusiastically accepting of gay people - in a way that is just as comically excessive as his original prejudice.

Lizzy and the Produce with Soul

Story concept · In development

At thirteen, Lizzy discovers that fruits and vegetables can talk to her. Friendship changes how she understands food, death, and remembrance.

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At thirteen, just as her peers are entering puberty, sweet-natured Lizzy develops a very different change: fruits and vegetables begin talking to her. Unable to eat beings she now considers friends, she becomes a carnivore and even orders meat for delivery because the produce section at Walmart feels like genocide. Her family's lemon and lime trees become especially important as she befriends each new generation of fruit, only to watch them age, rot, and die. Over time, Lizzy concludes that allowing her friends to rot unused may be no kinder than eating them. She eventually eats fruits and vegetables as an act of remembrance and honor, allowing them to literally become part of her.

Gore Wins: An Alternate America

Story concept · In development

Al Gore wins the 2000 election. One altered outcome opens a branching exploration of American policy and its consequences for the world.

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The 2000 U.S. presidential election ends differently: Al Gore becomes president instead of George W. Bush. From that single change, the story follows the branching consequences of history - the response to September 11, the war in Afghanistan, whether the United States invades Iraq, the pursuit of al-Qaeda, climate policy, the development of the internet, economics, political culture, and countless smaller choices. The central idea is not that the alternate timeline must be better or worse, but that seemingly small changes in leadership and policy can produce enormous consequences for billions of lives.

Sebastian and the Lost Gospel

Story concept · In development

An archaeologist uncovers a gospel that could shake foundational Christian beliefs. Three possible outcomes examine the responsibility that comes with discovery.

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Archaeologist Sebastian discovers a hidden gospel in Africa containing evidence that, if authentic and made public, could overturn foundational beliefs about Jesus and Christianity. The discovery creates an almost unbearable moral dilemma: does truth obligate him to reveal it even if doing so could devastate the faith of billions and destabilize relationships among religions, or can destroying the evidence ever be morally justified? The story can unfold through three alternate outcomes - publication, destruction, and another path - without declaring which choice is correct, leaving the reader to decide what they would do.

Darnell and Stephen (Needs New Title)

Story concept · In development

Two brothers pursue football greatness together, then fall apart when one comes out as gay. Their paths through professional football offer a chance at reconciliation.

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Darnell and Stephen grow up as brothers after Stephen's family takes Darnell in when Darnell's parents leave him at fourteen. Stephen is a quarterback and Darnell his star receiver; together they shatter high-school records, attend the same college, and train relentlessly until Darnell earns the scholarship he was initially denied. Their bond fractures before the NFL draft when Stephen comes out as gay and Darnell reacts with distrust and hostility. Darnell becomes a first-round pick while Stephen goes undrafted, yet Stephen fights through heckling and adversity to become a starting quarterback and reach the Super Bowl. After Darnell tears his ACL and struggles to recover, Stephen ultimately helps bring him onto his team's practice squad. The brothers reconcile and are given the chance to make history together again.

A Mother's Final Game (Tale of 3 Sisters)

Story concept · In development

Three estranged sisters must decipher the labels in their mother’s will. Her final puzzle sends them back through the memories that once held them together.

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Three estranged adult sisters gather after their mother's death and discover that her will and diary refer to them only as "the smart one," "the pretty one," and "my favorite." The executor tells them they must determine which sister is which, triggering arguments, old resentments, and a forced journey through childhood memories. As they read deeper, they discover that the stories have been deliberately mixed: their mother recorded examples of each daughter being beautiful, each being intelligent, and each being her favorite. Her final game was never about ranking them; it was designed to make them remember one another, confront their estrangement, and understand that she loved all three equally.

The Overnight Road Trip

Story concept · In development

A stranded salesman and a mother share a rental car after a canceled flight. An overnight journey forces a choice between ambition and compassion.

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A forty-year-old traveling robotics salesman and a mother are stranded at the same airport after a canceled flight. He is desperate to reach the biggest sales pitch of his career; she is trying to visit her daughter at college for the first time. Discovering they share a destination, they rent a car so they can alternate driving and arrive by morning - only for him to reveal that he has been drinking and for her to reveal twenty minutes later that her license is suspended. The comedy gradually gives way to genuine connection as they talk through what awaits them. Near the destination, with just enough time left for his career-defining meeting, she learns that her daughter has been in an accident. He immediately sacrifices the meeting and takes her to her daughter, choosing another person's crisis over the opportunity he believed defined his life.

The Hardware Store

Story concept · In development

A father assumes his daughter will inherit the store he spent decades building. Her different plans ask him to reconsider what his life’s work truly means.

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A 58-year-old man has spent thirty-one years building a successful neighborhood hardware store and quietly assuming that his daughter will inherit it. At twenty-nine, she tells him that she loves him, appreciates the life the store gave their family, but simply does not want it. Neither is wrong. The story follows the father's stages of grief as he realizes that he has been mourning a future that existed only in his imagination. Eventually he understands that giving his daughter the ability to choose her own path is evidence that his sacrifices succeeded. The store may pass to someone who truly wants it, while his daughter inherits something less tangible: her father's values, memories, knowledge, and the childhood they shared there.

Heartbeat

Story concept · In development

An ordinary life unfolds through defining moments of joy, love, and loss. A final revelation transforms the meaning of every decision that came before.

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A seemingly ordinary man's entire life is told through a small number of defining moments rather than continuous chronology: losing his mother at seven, gaining a stepmother, college rejection, community-college graduation, first love and betrayal, marriage, fatherhood, his wife's illness and death, finding love again, divorce, the death of a child, depression, loneliness, declining health, a large empty house, a nursing home, distance from children and grandchildren, and finally death. When his heartbeat stops, a sixteen-year-old boy suddenly wakes in a chair before a cheering crowd. The life was a tournament - a simulation designed to test the decisions a person makes while facing the devastation, joy, love, grief, and ordinary choices of existence. He has won. The reveal reframes the entire film: life is made of moments, and the moments are the game.

The Cycle of Now

Story concept · In development

A man awakens as a child in the 1950s with memories of the future. As those memories fade, the life he builds draws him toward an extraordinary discovery.

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A man dies in the modern era only to awaken as a child in the 1950s, retaining memories of the future. Raised by a deeply religious family that struggles to understand his impossible knowledge, he eventually uses what he remembers to accelerate the development of computer technology decades ahead of its natural course. But his greatest advantage slowly disappears as he grows older, his memories of his original life begin to fade, until the future that once seemed more real than his surroundings becomes fragmented and dreamlike.

He builds a life, falls in love, and unknowingly helps create the technological world that originally inspired his younger self. Only near the end, as his pregnant wife gives birth while he is dying, do the remaining pieces of memory finally align. He realizes that the child being born is himself—and that he has become the father he remembers from his original life.

His existence forms a closed causal loop: the technology of the future inspired him, but that technology existed because he carried knowledge of it into the past. There may never have been an original inventor or an original timeline. His two apparent lives were never truly separate; together, they form The Cycle of Now.

The Gospel of Thomas

Story concept · In development

A hacker inherits the ability to know a person’s expiration date. A trilogy explores technology, revelation, and how a lost civilization can become scripture.

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Thomas is a gifted hacker whose life changes when he inherits an impossible ability: he can look into another person and somehow know their exact expiration date. What begins as an inexplicable stream of information gradually pulls Thomas into a much larger struggle involving surveillance, intelligence agencies, technology, and a mysterious organization known as The Collective, which transforms revelation into institutional power.

Across the trilogy, Thomas is forced to confront the source and meaning of his gift while the distinction between technology, faith, and divine intervention becomes increasingly uncertain. What initially appears to be a supernatural technological conspiracy slowly reveals itself as something far larger: Thomas may be living through a modern event structurally analogous to the ancient stories humanity considers scripture.

As civilization moves toward extinction, the technological world surrounding Thomas begins to fall away. Hacking, global communications, intelligence agencies, money, surveillance, and eventually The Collective itself become insignificant beside the approaching catastrophe. Three people ultimately travel to the isolation of Easter Island, where their purpose becomes tied not merely to surviving the end of civilization, but to ensuring that humanity can begin again.

Easter Island becomes a modern ark, and Thomas's journey becomes the foundation of a new creation story.

If humanity survives and civilization is eventually rebuilt, the advanced world Thomas once knew may become incomprehensible to distant generations. Satellites become lights in the heavens. Wireless communication becomes invisible voices crossing the Earth. Artificial intelligence, aircraft, nuclear weapons, and genetic engineering become the stuff of legend. Science becomes mythology through the passage of time—and mythology itself raises the possibility of being misunderstood science or forgotten history.

In the end, The Gospel of Thomas is not merely the story of a hacker who receives an impossible gift. It is the story of the death of one civilization, the birth of another, and how the truth of what actually happened can eventually become scripture.

Jaspergeddon

Story concept · In development

A warrior repeatedly travels through time to save humanity from invasion. Living among the aliens changes his understanding of the enemy—and of victory.

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Jasper is the last of a group of future warriors sent back through time to prevent an alien invasion that destroys humanity. Each time he fails and dies, he returns to the future and tries again. After repeated failures, Jasper realizes he must allow the invasion to succeed so he can infiltrate the alien civilization and discover its weakness. Living among them for years, he befriends them, learns they came to Earth out of desperation for survival, and eventually discovers that lasers can penetrate their otherwise indestructible metallic skin.

Jasper returns to the past and introduces the technology humanity needs to fight back. Humans ultimately win the war, erasing Jasper's original future and causing him to disappear. But as he watches victorious humans enslave, torture, and kill defeated aliens, Jasper is left with one final question: Did he save the right race? He succeeded in preserving the human species—but the story leaves unanswered whether he preserved humanity itself.

Love Jump

Story concept · In development

A soldier welcomes peaceful alien visitors and falls in love. When humanity betrays their trust, he risks everything in a desperate leap through space.

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When humanity finally makes first contact, the visitors are peaceful, look remarkably human, and are just as excited to discover us as we are them. Sergeant Charles Endeavor is the first soldier to lower his weapon and welcome them, forming a connection with Brifa, an alien woman who eventually becomes his lover. As the two civilizations exchange language and technology, Brifa's people help humanity build its first interstellar ships and invite humans to visit their homeworld.

Unknown to Charles, the military secretly orders the expedition to destroy Brifa's civilization and steal its advanced technology. When Charles discovers the plan moments before the attack, he makes a desperate jump through space to Brifa's ship, warning her people just in time to prevent their complete destruction.

Brifa's civilization disables the human ship, rescues the crew members who were unaware of the attack, and takes Charles to their homeworld—a near-utopian society that reveals how tragically misplaced humanity's fear was. Charles is ultimately left between two worlds: the humanity he came from and the extraordinary woman and civilization he risked everything to protect.