Ideas on Stuff

Two ideas that have been bouncing around my head that I wanted to write down.

I want to write a city whose nickname is the Ever-Blossoming City. Every time the monarch dies, the core of the city is torn down and rebuilt in a style dictated by the new monarch. In years of plague or political upheaval, this may actually mean buildings would be torn down before they were finished being constructed. How much of the city is torn down depends on how prosperous the crown is, so you may see a hodgepodge of disparate design styles, grids leading into crisscrosses and what not.


Also, I want to write a short story named HARVEST TIME that focuses on two characters, a royal steward and a ship captain that has recently returned with goods from a newly discovered continent. He gifts them to the monarch and among those gifts is corn. The monarch feasts on the corn at dinner. That night, the corn turns up in the monarch's chamber pot and it is decided that corn is actually poison and the ship captain has tried to assassinate the monarch. It is the steward's job to catch him (and depending on how it develops, may be the person who convinced others corn was poison) while the captain flees in an attempt to prove his innocence.

Really, I just want to write a story where the plot is predicated on the fact that corn is still solid when you poop it out. How does that not freak people out?