Idea Garage Sale: Off My Meds

I've read a lot of portal fantasy in my time, but one thing I haven't seen is, someone who needs modern medicine stepping into a world where modern medicine is not available. The effect on the story would vary with the condition, and with conditions. A kid who needs Ritalin to sit still in class may find that coping mechanisms will still allow him to manage all right in a typical pseudo-European Medieval setting full of outdoor activities and alternating tranquility/crisis. A teen with severe body dysmorphia will suffer a lot without hormones, but may find some relief in an alien society's gender norms and expectations. An AIDS patient, a diabetic, or a chemical depressive without regular access to their meds, though, could feel a literal deadline approaching, distracting them from whatever heroism they're being called on to perform and providing a vector of temptation the Forces of Evil could exploit. Such a story taking the "meds are unnecessary" tack would be obnoxious; but it could be brilliant coming from someone with the condition and intimately familiar with all the advantages and disadvantages of the relevant medical treatments. The Ritalin kid may be delighted to find themself thriving in the new environment without the hassle of pilltaking, but the ADHD would be recontextualized, not conquered, and will kick in at various points in the plot, for both good and ill. A non-binary teen may find a differently-gendered society is all they need to relieve their discomfort, but will a transman in a society with no concept of gender feel any more at home in his body just because nobody else around him sees a discrepancy between it and how he presents himself? A twenty-something with a chronic condition who has been taking the same pill since they were five may feel only relief from the routine of keeping track of it until half-forgotten symptoms rear their ugly heads at crucial moments, while a diabetic without access to insulin feels that their body is a ticking time bomb with no visible clock, constantly obsessing over their diet and focusing on finding ways to get home to the detriment of whatever mission they're supposed to be on. Conversely, someone portaling from a less medically advanced world to a a more, or from a mundane world to someplace where magical treatments are available, may be caught in a serious conflict between wanting their natural environment back, and living in an otherwise uncongenial world where they can expect their body to function a great deal better and for their lifetime to be much extended. Nobody ever seems to be allergic to their new environments, either, though it's possible I have seen that happen and it wasn't done memorably enough to stick. Similarly, the core idea here may have been done without my noticing it (it's a natural storyline for Seanan Macguire's Home for Wayward Children series); but if it has, I'm positive it can be done again. There's lots of medical conditions out there, after all.

Idea Garage Sale: The Library Angel

So, you know how you're looking for information on something and not getting it, but you're deep in the stacks looking for something else and this book falls on your head and lands on the floor open to the page that directly addresses your question?

Or you find something shelved in the wrong area of the library, the right one being a place you would never ever go, and when you pull it out you realize that this is the book you desperately needed but didn't know enough to look for?

Or you're walking past a section that you know is completely irrelevant to your research topic, but the librarian has made a display and the cover of one sets off your Research Topic Alarm bells and sunovagun, that's the only book in the section you could use and it sends you in a whole new direction?

Or you put a book back and it bumps up against something and you dig back there and find a book that should have been culled a couple of years ago, but it was caught in the middle of the stack and overlooked and it's an obscure title by your favorite author?

Arthur Koestler dubbed this "the library angel," and you know what's weird?

As much as writers love and rely on the library angel, they don't write books about it. Okay, so a quick search turns up a Kindle novel with that title on Amazon, but it's a psychological thriller. Which I don't understand, because this is a concept that'd make a great picture book; or an early reader; or a middle-grade fantasy. The Library Angel is at least as viable a fantasy character as the Tooth Fairy, Fairy Godmothers, leprechauns, Santa Claus, and all the other pop-culture and traditional entities that populate the modern mind and the picture book/early reader section.

Think about it - a picture book following a Library Angel around a busy day of library service, producing just the right blue medium-sized book that the patron can't remember the title of, hiding a title that'll be needed in two weeks but is about to get culled right now, mis-shelving things that the library clerks (not knowing any better) have put in the correct place where the person who needs it will never find it, shoving a book out just enough that the stubborn person who won't ask for help can see it. Her love/hate relationship with the Computer Gremlins. Her professional meetings with the Angels of other libraries and those of bookstores. The threat of library closures - how can they help? The challenge of working in an underfunded library in an underserved part of the city.

We all care about this stuff. Perhaps too intensely to be whimsical about it. But are whimsy and passion really that incompatible? Not in a picture book, I don't think.

Idea Garage Sale: The Fog of Lethargy

Something's come over the house today. Damon and I normally wake up at 7:40 for NPR's Sunday puzzle. I managed, thanks to the cat wanting his breakfast, to get up and turn the radio on, but Damon would not wake up to play it with me. And the next thing we knew it was a quarter to ten. Damon was up pretty late last night, but I wasn't, and here it is 11:30 and I'm still groggy, alternately staring at the screen, playing solitaire, or flipping through the Fortean Times I got yesterday thinking: "There's that; but no, I can't face all the ramifications of changeling murder, not this morning." It's as if some sort of magic, will-sucking fog lay over the house, maybe even the neighborhood - I haven't heard a car pass or a dog bark all morning, come to think of it the Presbyterian church hasn't rung its carillon -

Wait. There you go. There's a fog over a town, or a part of a town, draining the energy from the inhabitants. That implies that someone needs that energy? For what purpose? Hardly a benign one; or, if it started as benign (and few people set out to do evil) it has been corrupted by setting up the transfer using a pool of people who have been provided no information and given no consent. It must be something pretty big to need a whole Sunday morning's worth of personal energy.

The nature of the lethargy fog is hardly important. The technobabble explaining it can be spun however you like, depending on whether you're going for fantasy, science fiction, or magical realism. The important issues are who is creating it, and why. Answer those questions, and the rest of the story will start to gel. Is the protagonist the person setting up the fog, and what does this act do to his character arc? Is it someone from within the fog cloud, and how does she go about learning the truth and doing something about it, given the handicap of the fog's effects? As a person affected, I find I prefer that the hero not be some outsider, that the town and its denizens not be a mere abstract marker for how depraved the villain is, helplessly waiting for the hero to come to the rescue, but this is a perfectly valid thing to happen in, for instance, an episodic superhero comic.

I'm sorry; I'm too sleepy to work it out any further. You can take it from here.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cat Within

You, right now, this minute, as you sit here catching up on your blog reading, turn into a cat. What happens?

"Wait, what? How did I turn into a cat? Is this supposed to be magic, a curse, a mad scientist dosing my coffee, what?"

Well, that's the difference between idea and execution, isn't it? Every single person who ever starts from an idea like this will develop it individually. How and why the transformation happens will depend whether the author prefers fantasy, science fiction or horror.

Nor are those questions the ones that matter most. The difference between fantasy and science fiction is largely one of imagery and is of no particular moment to the story itself. No, the important story questions are: What problems are created by you turning into a cat? and What problems are solved that way?

The development of these problems into a plot, and the florescence of plot into story, will depend on who you are and what your life is like. Are you fond of, disgusted by, or indifferent to cats? Do you have a pet and how will it respond to you as a cat? Who do you live with, and how will those people react? Where are you supposed to go and what are you supposed to do after catching up on your blogs? Are you better qualified to write about dogs, horses, birds, or armadillos than cats?

The question that brings the story to its resolution is: How much control do you have over the transformation?

Writing a story is a matter of asking questions of yourself, and finding the answers however you can.

It's just that simple.

It's just that hard.

Idea Garage Sale: The Longest Vacation

So there's this kingdom, with magic, and the wizards made this little haven refuge, a pocket dimension, where the royal families could go on vacation. They'd be perfectly safe, and happy - the weather would do what they wanted, there would always be food, gardens, etc. It's hard to keep track of time passing inside, but that's okay, as long as there's somebody trustworthy on the outside to say the magic words and call the family home.

So the royal family goes there on the eve of the princess's wedding, to rest up and make last-minute preparations for the big party. And it starts to seem to them that they've been here for awhile...

Turns out the trustworthy person wasn't so trustworthy, took over, and never told anybody the magic words. So the country was ripe when the Age of Revolution rolled around. Three hundred years and umpty-ump wars later, the country is a constitutional democracy, the palace is a museum, and though nothing's perfect, one thing the entire country agrees on is, that nobody needs a monarchy back.

The entrance to the pocket dimension is in the museum. It's something trivial, not magic-looking at all. Maybe it's the door to a dressing room or something.

The trustworthy usurper never told anyone the magic words, but they're perfectly ordinary words, strung together in a peculiar order. Which is why the teen daughter of the curator used them for a secret code, maybe a password to an electronic device. And the royal family comes home to a world that doesn't need them.

They become celebrities, of course. Other than that, what happens to each of them depends on who they are, what they want most, and how adaptable they are.

Is the King an easy mark for political manipulation? Does the Queen assume that all this democracy nonsense will go away when the royal family apologizes for the inadvertent absence and expresses its willingness to return to its duty? Is the Princess relieved that she doesn't have to marry the Prince anymore and anxious to sign up for art classes at the local community college? Does the Prince come out of the closet and become a spokesman for gay rights? Do the younger princes and princesses have to enroll in school?

What uses are devised for the pocket dimension magic?

Does the girl who accidentally released them feel ultimately responsible for them, and spend the rest of the book scrambling to bring them up to speed and keep them out of trouble? Yes, I suspect she does...

Idea Garage Sale: Hammer? Nail? Sparrow? Snail?

We all know that to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But have you considered that, to a person with a nail, everything looks like a hammer?

This is one of the key points made in Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, (which I'm about to Spoil big time - so go off and read it; it doesn't take that long) in which the character Terrance Cee, who has been raised by those who wish to mass-produce his gene for telepathy and use him and other telepaths for intergalactic espionage. He's very bitter about even having the gene, knows how to use telepathy as a weapon, and is cynical about the motives of the people he meets when he first ventures into the civilian world with goals of his own. When he meets Ethan, an obstetrician from an all-male planet (just read it!) he hides his abilities; when Ethan discovers them anyway, he is braced for what will happen when his erstwhile friend realizes what telepathy can do. Ethan, however, is delighted, thinking of the possibilities for medical uses with preverbal children and stroke patients.

You do something besides writing stories. Everybody does. You see a lot of superpowers in the media - everybody does, whether it's called a superpower, or magic. In the movies, these powers tend to be used in the context of interpersonal conflicts. A Villain wants to use his superpower to Rule the World; a Hero wants to use it to Save the World.

But you are not a Villain or a Hero. What do you want to do with it?

What does a plumber want to do with it? A vet? A nurse? A teacher? A janitor? A librarian? A lawyer? A waitress?

A single parent? A thrownaway child? A new widow? A lonely goatherd?

Does a person who has been blind since birth use a superpower differently from a sighted person, a color-blind person, a person blinded only recently?

What are the logical consequences of that?

Can you make a viable story built around a superpower that is not used as a weapon, but as the actual solution to an actual problem?

Try, and find out.

Idea Garage Sale: Soap Opera Ever After...

If tragedy ends in death, and comedy ends in a wedding, what do we call the drama that falls in between?

"The morning after the wedding -"

- Cinderella began her long battle to reform inheritance laws and improve conditions for servants.
- The dwarfs called in a favor from Snow White.
- The reformed rake's past came back to haunt him in the form of a dozen paternity suits - which the good woman whose love saved him insisted he take responsibility for.
- The surviving soldiers of the Armies of Dark and Light, the war over, were turned loose to find their own ways home.
- The princess started teaching the woodcutter's son, now King, how to read.
- The bickering lovers started matchmaking all their friends.
- All the magical creatures in the kingdom rushed to fill the power void left by the fall of the Wicked Witch.
- The abusive family found someone new to abuse.
- The bride refused to change the habits she formed while living in disguise as a boy in for forest, and set a new fashion.
- The Frog Prince discovered he could still understand the language of amphibians, and craved flies.
- The older sons, passed over for the throne, began their campaign to have the old king declared incompetent, based on the tests he devised to determine who would inherit; and the brides they brought home teamed up to advance their own agendas.

(Yeah, it's been done before. That's not a reason not to do it again.)

Idea Garage Sale: Away

A family at their wits end - a mother and two daughters, say - driving from an untenable situation to an unknown, uncertain, undesirable future - get onto the wrong farm-to-market road at night, and the car breaks down. Their cell phone has no service. So they sleep in the car till it's light enough, and when they wake up see, what they couldn't see at night, that they are right outside a small town called Away.

It's a peculiar town, but not in a frightening way. The fact that they don't have any money to pay the guy at the garage doesn't keep him from hauling it in: "S'okay, no guarantee I can fix it anyhow. May as well take a look." The lady who runs the diner has a sign in her window for a waitress that's so old it's sun-faded; may as well give the mother the job. The pay's lousy, but is in cash (worn silver and gold and paper with odd designs and old, old dates on it, but the local storekeepers accept it and in fact it all circulates all over town over and over and over again, the same coins recognized as they go from hand to hand) includes use of a little walk-up apartment out back, so they have a roof over their heads.

Not every house has electricity; those that do, use generators ingeniously designed to be fueled by a number of different fuel types. The garage is also a blacksmith's and has facilities for fixing horse-drawn vehicles and flivvers, and the mechanic himself drives a '57 Chevy. Nobody delivers gasoline to his ancient pump, and yet if anyone needs gas it always has some. The old lady at the diner cooks on a wood stove. The whole place is a cobbled-together hodgepodge, people with odd accents, individuals from many different backgrounds but no identifiable ethnic subpopulations, technology and styles and attitudes from different eras, and yet it all meshes together, somehow, peacefully.

The car never gets fixed, the phones are all landline and all connected through a central switchboard that isn't on the national network, nobody's heard of WiFi, nobody takes a newspaper; the little circulating library has a limited number of books from incunabula to paperbacks; but the mother ceases to care. Her kids are fed. She has a roof. Maybe she starts dating the mechanic. She's able to relax and takes up something that used to interest her.

But the girls are the only kids in town; or, if there is another kid, he was born here. What to their beleagured mother looks like a refuge, to them feels like, and is, a trap.

Away is where people go when they're at the end of their ropes and need a place to stop stressing and just be.

Away is the opposite of where kids need to be.

Kids always leave Away. Or else they stop growing.

But once you leave, you can't get back. Until and unless you're at the end of your rope...

I kind of needed Away myself, when I thought of this, and couldn't put a plot together because I personally needed a rest, not a plot. I had a certain amount of fun planning the households, though.

It's basically a Twilight Zone episode; but a TZ episode would be ending right at the point that the kids need to start the crux of the plot.

Idea Garage Sale: Urban Fantasy, Squared

So anyway I'm reading this anthology called Weird Detectives, and there's this story in it by Elizabeth Bear that I find uncomfortable for reasons that are neither here nor there at the moment, but when the upper-class white wizard/detective in the story tracks down a lower-class Hispanic supplier to get a specific component needed to deal with the threat, she sizes him up and asks him where he and his were when the threat was confining itself to her neighborhood. A question he acknowledges as valid but which is not followed up in the story. Perhaps it is elsewhere in other works about the same character.

But I was shocked to find that I hadn't noticed before how overwhelmingly true it is that low-fantasy and urban fantasy stories mostly involve white magical people dealing with threats to white mainstream people from white people. Ethnic magic may or may not be used and referenced, and urban fantasy particularly may have lots of people of color in supporting roles, but think about it - when was the last time you saw a black or Hispanic or Asian master vampire or protagonist vampire hunter? (Okay, I can think of one. Plus Blacula.)

Or a white master vampire preying preferentially on lower-class people of color?

Or tribal Little People instead of imported European fey in an American setting?

Yet it is absolutely true that if you live by preying on humanity, you will target (like any predator) the most vulnerable members of a population; and in America, the most vulnerable members are the poor, and the most vulnerable poor are people of color living in large concentrations. Crime, even horrible crime, in those neighborhoods does not attract the mainstream public attention that serves to protect the public. A vampire who preys on people who won't be missed, like the serial killer who does the same, will be operating in low-income neighborhoods and feeding off people of color. Heck, if he's old and rich enough (as so many of them are) he may even regard them as legitimate prey and in no way a stain on his character, whereas he would think less of himself if he went after middle-class high school students or people with ancestors from the Mayflower.

In which case, the independent supernatural task forces would logically be made up primarily of the people who are most invested in those neighborhoods.

Why shouldn't a street gang recognize that a supernatural threat is operating on their turf, and go after it?

Why shouldn't the people operating or using the Salvation Army soup kitchen, or the local Goodwill, or the Planned Parenthood clinic, or the flophouse be the ones noticing that disabled vets are turning up dead with non-needle holes in their veins, that one particular up-and-coming gang only comes out at night, or that recent immigrant single mothers all tell the same weird story of this guy who paralyzed them with his eyes?

Why isn't the curandera operating the botanica as the covert nerve center of the supernatural underground?

Why not?

I'd read any one of those books. I'd watch any one of those series, or at least give it a shot. I'd buy that ticket. Wouldn't you?

Idea Garage Sale: The Item of Doom

So you're in a perfectly ordinary pleasant public park and you get a sudden intense sense of doom and despair. You find an object that seems, by experimentation (!) to be the source.

What does that mean?

In the real world of individual experience, this sort of thing generally means nothing at all. One day the object's there, giving off an Atmosphere of Dread; another day, it's not. Somebody knows more; but it's entirely possible that this person doesn't even know about the Atmosphere of Dread.

The object might have been part of an attempt at a curse ritual; either as part of an actual magical practice (and don't think for a moment that no one is attempting to practice magic in South Texas!) or as an emotional release mechanism. Or it might be part of a game, either a child's make believe or a LARP. It looks like a good place for a LARP, though if you go to a park regularly you'd probably notice if it's often used by people in costume throwing spell packets at each other and hitting each other with boffer swords. In which case, the feeling of dread comes, not from the object, but from the observer; which puts an entirely different spin on events and this is the point at which "storymaking mode" detaches entirely from reality, if we are wise. It is not our business to speculate about the real person who wrote the post, but to start building a character who can be in a story, borrowing this piece of experience as a launching pad.

I've always been interested in the people on the fringes of the story; both in the story, and in real life. If the plot of a fantasy novel involves a storm called up by magic in the real world, I wonder how it's affecting the people who aren't in the story; the neighbors, the people passing through, the mailman trying to deliver the mail in preternatural darkness full of howling storm monsters. And when a storm comes up unexpectedly or has unusual features, a part of my mind wonders who summoned it up, and why, and what dramatic events the people the story are about are engaged in, and in what ways I might intersect with and get drawn into the plot.

What if that thing was a curse object, and in the interim between visits, either the curser repented, or the victim located and destroyed it?

What if, before they could do so, it were carried away?

Whose story is it? That's the first question. Answer that, and it will affect how the magic of the curse works; why the curse was cast; and what the results are. My own inclination is to have an innocent bystander carry it away and make the spell go all wonky, so that the closed circuit of the person who cast the curse and the victim of the curse is opened, and magic begins to ricochet around the neighborhood; and to mount the story on a tripod of viewpoint character - curser, victim, and innocent bystander.

But that's far from the only way to handle it.

Idea Garage Sale: Memory Lane

So, yesterday the author sessions I attended at the Texas Book Festival both dealt at some level with memory. Guadalupe Garcia McCall talked about how she wrote the poem that eventually burgeoned into Under the Mesquite, showing her class of skeptical 13-year olds (I think it was 13-year olds) how easy it is to get a subject for a poem. First, she tapped a memory - the first one that came to mind, since she was under the gun - and then when she had it she had them time her and, just as they'd dared her, she wrote a poem in under five minutes. And then eventually she had to go deeper and deeper and deeper into memory, to places she didn't want to go, in order to write the book, which also finally enabled her to come to terms with her mother's death.

In the session on "Sense of Birthplace," Beatriz de la Garza was talking about how a trunk of family papers was her way in to the history of the Republic of the Rio Grande, and Sarah Cortez was wildly enthusiastic about memoir and how we use it to understand one another across our various identity boundaries.

Now, this is something I don't do. Okay, sure, I tap my memory all the time because in the end, what else do any of us have? But I've got personal memory and reading memory and listening memory all jumbled up. Everything goes into the pot and flavors everything else. I don't draw directly on my own particular memories until I need them in service to a story because I do not find myself interesting.

(It couldn't possibly be because there's things in my memory I don't want to think about and places I never want to go again. Nope, nope, nope. Not me. And anyway, when I need to go there to retrieve stuff for a story I'm already working on, I can do it, but going there to get a story? I'm not that desperate, thanks. The back door's my chosen route.)

And though I can pass on advice about using your own memory as a story source, it's not a suitable topic for a garage sale because it's not specific enough. Sure, I could give you a story seed based on one of my memories, but the whole strength of the technique is based on each of us going down our own personal memory lanes to retrieve our own strongest emotions.

Memory Lane. Now, that's an image. It's long (and gets longer as we age), and parts of it are very dark indeed but parts are all bright and sunny and we'd like to get to them. If we could do it without going through the dark parts.

What if you put a person onto her own memory lane for a story? Send her down a physical path that she gradually realizes is her own life?

Hm. That's not generating anything all by itself. You have to create the character before you can create the memory lane, and either trick her onto it or create a crisis that forces her down it, in order to have enough structure for a story. Because of course memory isn't structured at all. It isn't even chronological. When you go down memory lane, you carom from memory to memory, from last year to high school to college to junior high to your first time in a wading pool by association. Even if it's a magic realist story, you need more structure than that.

And I don't know about you, but I prefer stories with multiple characters. The opportunities for dynamic interaction with the people in your memory are limited. Maybe you can understand your mother, or your bully, or your ex, now with the benefit of hindsight, but you can't communicate that understanding to your previous self and you can't change your past behavior toward them any more than you can change their behavior toward you.

So what if you're going down somebody else's memory lane? And can interact with her fruitfully while there?

What if a child, or grandchild, or a caregiver (who became a caregiver because she had this talent) has to go down the memory lane of someone with a memory malfunctioning due to age and/or illness? What if someone you love is lost in a maze of memories and you go in after her, to take her by the hand and lead her back to the present?

Can you face what you'd learn about her, doing this? Can you face what you'd learn about yourself?

And how do you avoid making this a silly fantasy about using your magic talent to cure Alzheimer's or something sentimental like that?

Idea Garage Sale: Fragment

Just stumbled upon these notes today. They may, or may not, be related to a short story I wrote ages ago and never sold in which a teen-ager, dissatisfied with the humdrum, unromantic routine of spells, broomsticks, and cottages of the real world, dreams of a fantasy world in which people have bicycles and airplanes and indoor plumbing.

OK, so what can Charlotte do about the war? Nothing in the normal way of things, but when she takes the broomstick into town next day, what does she discover that Sir Trevor de Vere wouldn't want her to know?

Meet somebody from a technological parallel universe?

The faery have a vested interest in the war going on and are manipulating behind the scenes?

I'm pretty sure the King's name is Fred...

Supervillains in Retirement

So, as you can probably tell from the hour at which I'm posting this, it was kind of a crappy week; but I wasted the time productively, getting a shareable Sims2 neighborhood to the testing stage and passing it along to a couple of people for playtesting. One must keep the wheels turning somehow, and if nothing else it's an exercise in a new format. Anyway, one of the characters is a Criminal Mastermind (the top of the game's criminal career) who has, theoretically, retired to the country, except that he hasn't quite gotten around to the part where he stops working. As a result, he drives off in a limo to commit dastardly deeds every night and shows up in a supervillain costume to hang out at the swimming pool or the General Store during the day. Sometimes he pokes people and sometimes he comes with his wife and spends all his time canoodling her.

When one of my playtesters sent me notes on play, I was amused to find that she was loving this guy, making plans to get him a Persian cat named Doomsday to love on, when suddenly she looked in the relationship panel on the Heads Up Display and uncovered the affair he'd had with a young lady (now pregnant by his son) and became furiously angry with him. He can be a supervillain offstage all he wants, and it's cute; but she can see his wife, and his wife adores him, and cheating on her is Different.

I get this, but I also find it hilarious.

And then she sends me pictures of him out and about in his supervillain finery, and I start to wonder, How would you do this in a story? And could you do it, and be funny, without sacrificing a strong moral sense?

Mad geniuses and over-the-top supervillains have been a bit of a meme for awhile now. I first became aware of this in 2005, when I started reading Narbonic, a comic about mad genius and romantic love. I see it in YA literature (Catherine Jinks does it quite well), knocking around the web (as in the grand satire "Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog"), and it's even reached the mainstream movie audience in Despicable Me. But as far as I know the Monty Python bunch led the way with a sketch called "Mr. Neutron," in which "the most dangerous man in the world" prompts government officials, spies, and so on to take all kinds of panicked action, while he goes around chatting with the neighbors, sitting in spindly garden chairs, and going shopping. He apparently has the power to destroy the universe, but not the motivation. (What motivation would be sufficient, anyway?)

But could you center a work on a figure who was evil, and likeable, and retired to the country, and never did anything to the people around him; and bring him to justice; and make the reader feel both the powerful necessity of bringing him to justice, and the pity that it should be necessary?

And if you could do all that and still make people laugh (because people hate stories that make them think too hard, but will forgive any work that also makes them laugh) -
Well, you'd have done a good job of work, then.

Idea Garage Sale: Call Me Crazy...

A few years ago, my husband and I were woken in the middle of the night a couple of times by a neighbor calling the curse of God down on us from the street. Her relations were very apologetic about this, and explained that she'd gotten away from them, and that her conviction that we were Satanists who were putting spells on her was probably something to do with the fact that she used to live in our house with her grandmother, though they weren't sure what. In any case, they were pretty sure it was nothing directly personal, but they warned us that, since they had a hard time riding herd on her, we should be careful about locking our doors. She showed no sign of being violent, but if her delusions were centered around our house, her becoming convinced that she needed to get into it was a distinct possibility.

A few days ago, this woman stopped me on the street to apologize for her own behavior, thank us for being understanding about it, and tell me she liked my dress (which happened to be one I'd made myself - always the best compliments). She's got the right meds now and is doing much better, enough better to be as embarrassed as her relatives were. But honestly, something like that, you can't hold against somebody any more than you'd hold it against a cancer patient that she threw up on your shoes.

All of which makes me think about those fantasy and horror novels in which things happen in objective reality that are so off-the-wall and outside of human experience that everyone in the story except the protagonist assumes that the protagonist must be mad. But in those stories, the protagonist is the only one seeing clearly, and his seemingly-mad actions - the magical ritual or secret violence at the heart of the fantasy and/or horror - are the things that prevent disaster. Or sometimes there's a madman in a mystery story, and his madness will either lead him to do something terrible, or leave him vulnerable to manipulation by the real villain.

And the thing is this: In neither type of story (generally) is the reader in any doubt about whether there's insanity in the case or not. But wouldn't the emotional impact of a story be enhanced if the reader does spend most of the story changing his mind about what is and is not reality?

I have read stories that did this. Liar, by Justine Larbalestier, does a stand-up job of messing with your head in this way; and there's a Stephen King short about a kindergarten teacher who becomes convinced that the children in her classroom have been replaced by aliens in which the teacher's point of view is maintained so meticulously I couldn't be sure whether she was right, or not. But it is a tremendously difficult thing to do in the context of a market dominated by genre expectations and with a relentlessly genre-savvy audience.

It would also be an extremely uncomfortable thing to do, and would require the kind of specialist knowledge about the subjective experience of mental illness which racks up the emotional cost of writing to an even more uncomfortable pitch. You'd want to do it with sensitivity toward the mentally ill; who, face it, could be anybody. And you'd be forced to go to the weak places in your psyche; the fault lines along which your own mind could break.

You wouldn't have to have direct experience of mental illness yourself; but you'd have to have been close to it enough times to put yourself into the head of someone who is in real doubt about whether he's mad, the degree to which he can trust his senses, and what to do about it. And that's a difficult, scary place to go. A friend of mine (who I trust will excuse me for telling this story) who had herself committed during a bad patch said during her process that she was "a bacterium in a petrie dish." When her husband repeated this to me, I - like him - knew what she meant; she was speaking metaphorically, about the unfortunate fact that to be a mental patient at this phase of our understanding of mental disease is to be an experiment. We'd discussed this many times when she was lucid. But those committing her assumed she'd meant it literally. When she was lucid again I asked her which of us had been right - had she been trying to convey that idea to the medical persoonnel, or had she truly felt herself to be a bacterium? Her answer was "yes;" and this blurring of the mental line between metaphor and reality is a terrifying thing.

It is also where the interest of this story concept lies.

But that blurring doesn't only happen in mental illness. Perfectly healthy people with religious beliefs also treat certain metaphors as realities, because the realities they express are too difficult for the finite human brain to encompass without the metaphor. If you weren't familiar and comfortable with the cultural background and symbolism of communion, you'd have a hard time bending your head around the concept that crackers and grape juice are the body and blood of the son of God, or believing that any nice sort of person who believed that would then eat it!

So if the problematical concept about which the reader is intended to be uncertain echoes real religious beliefs, it should be easier for us to raise that doubt. Also, easier to piss off a lot of people and get banned...because you weren't playing nearly close enough to the edge when you decided you wanted to address perceptions of mental illness in this story, oh no! You could have a fringy cult, something pagan, or one of those numerous schisms of the Protestant church that either die on the vine or become full-fledged churches; perhaps a leader who thinks he's a shyster but someone from the lower ranks sees all too clearly what's Really Going On, and both of them have their character flaws arranged in such a way that the reader flip-flops constantly between versions of reality as envisioned by this book...

Doing this would be worthwhile, with the right characters and concept at the heart of it; but finding those characters and that concept - well, that's the hard part, isn't it?

Idea Garage Sale: Schroedinger's Note

This one's from my husband, Damon. So you see it's not just writers who do this!

We both just read The Future of Us, by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, and he was thinking. You have one of those high school notes where the writer gives the recipient a multiple choice question and the recipient ticks one blank and passes the note back. The question is a typical high school one - go to homecoming with me yes/no, free for lunch yes/no, like the same person as me yes/no - but the answer has repercussions.

This note is in a box. Until the box is opened, both answers are ticked. The person whose job it is to open the box can't bear to do so, and will be living the repercussions of both answers alternately until the box is opened.

An advantage of making this a high school story is that certain events are locked in - the homecoming dance will occur on schedule, the protagonist is already committed to certain extracurriculars and classes, the parents' job and marital milestones and difficulties will not be changed by the protagonist's behavior - so that it's a simple matter to examine the different emotional repercussions of each answer and the ripple effect of each within the peer group within a locked-in framework. Sooner or later, though, a situation will arise in which the way a major decision is made, one that follows logically from the original note, and from that point the future is locked in - the protagonist can't have it both ways anymore. To be fully effective, both futures should have notable upsides and downsides and the decision should be a lot harder than the question posed by the original note.

The problem here is that the logical person to open the box is not the person on whom the decision depends, but the person who asked the question in the first place. Which is all kinds of messed up - by asking the question, he's deflected the decision onto someone else and having done that, he can't very well take the power away. You could change it so that the object in the box is a wish object, but this removes the core of the idea, the thing that makes it interesting. So that's no good.

I suggested that the protagonist could be so cripplingly indecisive that he makes all his urgent decisions based on a coin flip or dice toss, in which case you've got not a box, but a dice cup clamped down on top of the fateful roll; and as long as Indeterminate Teen doesn't lift the cup, both futures are happening. This spectacularly dysfunctional character quirk then becomes a major element in the story, though, and dictates the character arc.

One thing that occurs to me now is that the note could be intercepted by some third party with a stake in the communication, but it's hard to imagine what that stake could be or how it could justify holding onto the note.

Maybe this is soluble, but between us, we haven't cracked it yet.

Idea Garage Sale: The Glass House

Okay, we have errands to do on the way to gaming today, so let's make this quick.

Short story I thought of a long time ago, before I knew I was a children's writer. Young woman who's consciously given up her dreams of a creative life, "facing reality," partly to please a young man she's no longer with, but she still has the life she got herself into for his sake. Poky apartment, soul-sucking day job. On an impulse, she buys a glass house from a flea market glassblower. After she gets it home and has lived with it, and had dreams set in it, for awhile, she realizes that it's a near-replica of a dream-house she inhabited mentally in high school. She probably drew plans of it, played at decorating the rooms and planting the garden while looking through catalogs, that sort of thing. In the dreams the house is also inhabited by the imaginary lover from those days, the idealized guy she wanted to meet. Though physically he looks a lot like her ex, in all the important ways he's the polar opposite. Of course, since he's a dream figure, he's also part of herself.

How exactly the glass house and the dream lover enable her to recognize the creative possibilities of real life I never worked out in any detail. Nowadays the whole concept seems self-indulgent. And could a glass blower make a suitably elaborate house, that a woman in her situation would still find affordable? Maybe not, unless he was a magician, in which case - magicians always want something.

Which makes this a much longer story.

Idea Garage Sale: Trickster-on-Trickster Smackdown

Jackrabbit, Raven, and Old Coyote,
Came by here and left you a note.

I scribbled that down one day in a soulsucking day job and forgot about it. The notes around it indicate that I was wondering how Coyote had become the premiere Trickster figure in modern American fantasy. He's 100% native, and that's good, but so is Raven, and he's stuck with his Old World associations with death and violence with no leavening of humor. Rabbit was supreme for a long time, manifesting as Brer Rabbit and Buggs Bunny, but I reckon just the fact that he's a prey species has acted against him. Modern Americans prefer predators. I remember Gayle Ross complaining once, on a shared school visit, of some white writer taking a Rabbit story and changing the protagonist to Coyote for no very good reason.

I think in terms of the continental US Raven is Northwestern (but he was General Houston's totem animal, and Houston's tribe of refuge was the Cherokee), Coyote Southwestern, and Rabbit hails from the Eastern Seaboard. Generally. But the tribes are all mixed up in the wake of the European invasion, anyway.

So what if they teamed up?

Against who?

The forces of law, as represented by - hmmm, there aren't very many memorable folkloric figures of law, are there?

What if they team up against other tricksters? Well, what other tricksters? Raynard the Fox, Anansi - hey, we could have two teams of three, with Rabbit playing for both teams as suited him.

What are the stakes? Is it pure farce, or is there a razorsharp satirical edge, suitable for these big movers and shakers to illustrate?

That could be epic. And complicated. A farce of trick and countertrick, bluff and double bluff, shifting allegiances, tables turning till they fly out the window. The kind of thing PJ Wodehouse used to plot on index cards tacked all around the walls of his room.

I am not clever enough to pursue this idea. I get dizzy just peering over the edge of it.

Idea Garage Sale: Goblin Kid

Rumplestiltskin is a story of a really messed up-family, when you think about it. The kid might be better off with a goblin than with his greedy, abusive father and his dishonest, shortsighted mother. Therefore:

Prolog: A variation on Rumplestiltskin, in which the queen does not guess the name.

Story: The child is raised by the goblin, and learns goblin skills in a goblin community. But they're marginalized by goblin society. The child is too tall, humans can't be trusted, Rumplestiltskin is viewed with suspicion. Something goes wrong (what?) and Rumplestiltskin is imprisoned, the child driven out.

The child finds his goblin skills inadequate to a rescue. He needs his human family now, so he goes looking for them. He only knows Rumplestiltskin's version of the story; the king, queen, and younger siblings have different ones. He has to learn all the stories to understand the circumstances of his adoption, and must learn human skills and find a place in human society before he can rescue his goblin parent and find his own secure hybrid identity, independent of the sins of his biological and foster parents.

This one falls down on my inability to figure out what Rumplestiltskin is imprisoned for and what human skill is necessary to free him. It'd require a lot of worldbuilding upfront.