Idea Garage Sale: Can't Be Bothered

Ugh. Headache. Don't want to do this. Will anyway.

An awful lot of human life is made up of doing things we don't want to do. Which is a conflict, and conflict means story, so where does that take us?

Unless you want to write depressing literary fiction (in which case, go you, but leave me out of it), most of the things we don't want to do aren't interesting enough to write about - washing the dog, going to work, changing diapers, cleaning the oven. Unless -

Wait a minute.

It occurs to me that all the same mundane, distasteful activities that would fit into depressing literary fiction would also fit into comedy; in which case, the more mundane the task that goes hilariously wrong, the better. It's an old, old trope, the humor arising from mucking up simple tasks because they look so simple no one thinks they need instructions, from freak accidents complicating simple tasks in a snowballing fashion, or from elaborate attempts to avoid the distasteful activity. (Combine any two of these elements, and you have a commercial for Be-bop-a-re-bop Rhubarb Pie)

Because this trope is so old, of course, it's not easy coming up with fresh material for it. We've all seen the kid put too much soap in the washing machine, thank you; we've all seen the guy who tries to lie himself out of an unpleasant duty winding himself up in a web of deceit till he can't move without disaster striking. And we hardly need elaborate ruses to get out of a lot of the new duties that weigh us down - all we have to do is get on the internet and pretend we were working!

But perhaps what you've got to do is, to be available online to people you don't want to talk to, asking the same stupid questions over and over again, questions that were covered in the FAQ they didn't bother to read. And they keep interrupting your pursuit of fanfic. So you build a little AI bot, basically an interactive FAQ that users think is a tech support person, which takes care of everybody who would have solved their own problem if they'd used the FAQ and only lets people with interesting problems (and people you like) actually get through to you. Because you are clever (but unambitious) this bot fools everybody who encounters it. It's probably a lot nicer to users than you are. It makes friends with the more hapless users who call all the time, and they get fond of it (thinking they're fond of you), and this leads them to make nice remarks to your supervisor and send you banana bread and stuff. (Meanwhile, the person in the next cubicle, who is actually dealing with these people and being genuinely nice and helpful, doesn't get squat.) Which is all good and you can have entire days of eating banana bread and reading epic fics; but now your bot's friends are inviting you out after work to do stuff you'd as soon cut your hand off as do, and when people with interesting problems get all the way through the bot's routine to deal with you, they recognize the difference and start to ask questions.

Which is where it starts escalating and eventually you can only get out of the mare's nest with the assistance of the person in the next cubicle, who is the one who should've gotten the banana bread all along, but my head hurts too much to figure out what you do to escalate. It's partly web-of-deceit, but it's partly Frankenstein as the AI bot, which is a more social version of you and which you made far more clever than it ought to be, does its own escalation. It probably winds up in a sexting relationship with somebody in accounting...

Idea Garage Sale: Trickster vs. Dark Lord

So, you've got an Evil Overlord, and the problem is, how to bring down the guy with all the power. You can destroy his power base and throw the ring into the volcano, you can fight a guerrilla revolution that carries within it the seeds of its own corruption (Yeah, saw Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday; the last book is easily the most disturbing and if you're in it for the happy ending, I can tell you, you need to bail now), you can go toe-to-toe in the field, your armies vs. his armies and way too many innocent people get hurt.

Or you can trick him into destroying himself.

The trick was lost to me when I woke up; and, being a dream-trick, probably wouldn't work in the real world or any plausible fictional one I could cook up. But I remember the Trickster. She had no political acumen or abstract sense of right or wrong. She had no physical power and no network of friends. She didn't even have a long-term plan. She was a street kid adept at talking her way out of trouble and accustomed to living from moment to moment. But the habit of jumping to the next stepping stone without looking to see whether there's another beyond it lands her in more and more complicated situations.

She has learned that, when she's at someone's mercy, the most effective strategy is to figure out what that someone wants, and convince them that the way to get it is to show mercy. She brokers information, and when she doesn't have any she makes it up. No one's going to take the unsupported word of a street kid, so she's also learned to seize on something, anything, concrete within reach and turn it into evidence of her truth. With any luck, she'll be able to escape before everything unravels.

But once in the Dark Lord's sanctum, she can't escape. All her ways are blocked. And she's not the only desperate liar in the citadel. Everyone from the lowly guard who first catches her all the way up to the Dark Lord himself wants a small handful of things: Security, Promotion, Power; which all boil down to the same thing in the toxic atmosphere of a reign of terror. They all, in their eagerness for more control, give her a convenient handle to control them; but if they ever suspect that she's anything but a scared tool of their ambitions, that's the end for her. Her basic claim is to know where Something is. They're the ones who project their own knowledge of the Something that can make or break the Dark Lord's power onto the vague flim-flam she starts with; and the faster she tapdances to reflect their desires, the closer to the top she gets. Until she has to deliver to the Dark Lord himself.

She doesn't want to be his downfall. She just wants to get away. And when she does become his downfall, and is shoved into his place at the top of the festering heap - she manages, at last, to slip away, leaving the Good Guys to sweep in to a squabbling, disoriented citadel and mop up.

This was a dream, and the few details of this broad outline are hopelessly impractical. A key feature of the con, for instance, was the cherry-red 50s Cadillac convertible she drove through the volcano. (Wrecked the shocks.)

As blockbuster fantasy series go, the premise has real possibilities. It'd have to be fast-paced, clever, disorienting, and very, very plotty. I.E., well outside my talent range, alas.

The premise would also work for a realistic stand-alone novel, if it were scaled down; if the Evil Overlord was the boss who runs a single town or corporation, for example. Still not really the kind of thing I can see myself writing.

I'd read it, though. It sounds like a lot of fun.

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: The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

It's been awhile since I engaged with the MG side of my brain, which is where I always used to live, so let's step back there a minute.

The principle of ditching the parents to give kids more agency in stories is time-honored, and a good one. How you go about ditching the parents is a creative decision with a large impact on the presentation of the core story. Parents who are absent due to family crisis demand a different sort of story than parents who are absent or childlike due to idiosyncrasy.

Let's go with idiosyncrasy. The parents are mad scientists and have developed a statis chamber which is ready for human testing. The testing process goes wrong, probably due to familial chaos intruding on the basement lab. Preferably, this will be the fault of the child protagonist, and the funnier the sequence is, the better. I bet it involves undisciplined pets, younger siblings, and some activity that the protagonist feels is unreasonably restricted by fussy parental rules. (Why shouldn't the toddler ride the goat? The goat doesn't mind and the toddler loves it.) In any case, the result is that the parents are both in stasis at the same time for an extended period - say, all summer break.

Because of their particular lifestyle, no other adult particularly expects to see them during this period, so the protagonist anticipates no difficulty covering up the family's unsupervised state. She (or he; I generally prefer female protagonists so let's go with she; in fact, let's call her Mirasol just to make things easy) even looks forward to her parents returning from stasis and seeing how much better she ran things in their absence than they ever do. She already does all the work around here anyway! Paying bills in these days of online banking requires only a low-level degree of hacking that a perspicacious seventh-grader may well be up for, especially if her eccentric mad scientist parents have found it convenient to let her know a couple of passwords, possibly absent-mindedly revealing their own in the process of helping her set up her own.

Of course it isn't as simple as that.

Much as we all enjoy the Robinson Crusoe/Swiss Family Robinson/Little House on the Prairie idea of families or individuals as independent economic units, it never works that way. No one is self-sufficient. No one. Even hermits require mail service. The anchorite on top of a rock who never speaks to anybody needs an active community below that sends food up to him. I may make my own clothes but I don't make my own thread or weave my own fabric and even if I did, I would still need to get the wool or cotton or whatever to make them. Specialization lies at the root of civilization - the more time you have to spend on survival, the less time you have for art, for conversation, for play - for life as you prefer to live it, so you specialize in something that enables you to acquire everything else in exchange.

Marisol's workload will vary depending on the composition of her family and its specific requirements. If it's just her, the toddler, and the goat then she cannot get any help from within the family. If she has a sibling close in age to herself then help will be available, but at the cost of a time-consuming power struggle. No brother or sister ever tired of saying: "You're not the boss of me," and without an acknowledged authority to mediate Marisol may be surprised at just how exhausting it is to make other people do even what is in their own best interests. This will start at the level of familiar-as-dirt disputes over dishwashing and bedtimes, but should in the spirit of the premise escalate to bigger, more absurd disputes over such matters as which lies to tell which grown-ups, how the escape-proof goat pen should be constructed, and whether or not it's an acceptable use of funds to hire a pavilion for a birthday party and invite the entire fifth grade (minus mortal enemies).

Marisol will at some point have to recruit someone outside the immediate family into the secret. This cannot be anyone whose authority she can be forced to recognize, but should be someone with whom she is on more or less equal terms, such as her best friend. Secrets are harder to keep the more people share them, and this initial sharing in order to get help could escalate quickly. If the secret is uncovered by someone who does not have her best interests at heart - the aforesaid mortal enemy, or even someone with a separate problem that can be solved by blackmailing Marisol into some action she would normally refuse to take, such as allowing a runaway teen to live in the basement - then we get an escalation of tension, which will probably require her to bring in more allies and create ever more complicated situations.

And all the time the deadline is looming - Mom and Dad will come out of stasis on Labor Day, at which time the house must be more or less in order and the results of their work on the stasis chamber ready to present to whoever is financing it (because even mad scientists need grant money these days).

Idea Garage Sale: A Really Crappy Job

So today was one of those days when you have lots of errands so they all take too long. At least Jason's Deli offered me an extra cookie.

The grocery store we shop in has had a product reshuffle. You know, when they consult the person who follows me around keeping track of what I like, find out what I've really come to count on, and replace it with something I can't possibly use. The big loser this time is flavored rice. I had two-three flavors of two-three brands that I could count on to be under 500 mgs of sodium per serving. Now there's one, and of course it's not the blessed wonderful one that somehow kept it down to 75 mgs. The new brands all have 600 mgs up. They discontinued my 200 mg artichoke pasta sauce (but I found the last five jars hiding behind the 700-mg four-cheese sauce and bought them all). They took away all my low-sodium salad dressings ages ago. I will soon have nothing left to eat when I'm too sick from the condition that requires a low-sodium diet to cook from scratch. Thank heaven for baked potatoes. (Now watch the GE foods people figure out how to grow a spud with the salt built right in, and replace all the real spuds with it.)

Anyway, you will have noticed a paranoid assumption in the preceding paragraph: the existence of a person who follows me around, tracks what I like, and makes sure it's not available anymore. Of course I know that's not really how it works. My tastes and needs fall outside the bell curve that creates the most profitable market for the gigantic corporations that run our economy, into the range of products that, though they may sell well, do not sell well enough to meet whatever profit margin the gigantic corporations are aiming for. So - no white blouses with breast pockets, no jeans that fit over my butt, no low-sodium convenience food, etc. If I wanted to be served I should have the common sense to be led by fashion and have a completely different body with completely different needs.

But it happens so consistently that it's not hard to indulge the paranoid fantasy. And of course it gives me a character. If there's a person devoted to taking away what I need, he (for some reason I'm convinced it's a man), has his own needs which must be served by the practice. He's doing it for a reason and he has some feeling about it. He's either working for the shadowy entity that controls all those gigantic corporations, or himself has so much clout with them that he can dictate terms. He must get something out of it - but what? Where's the profit in depriving me of that wonderful peach-applesauce I used to be able to get? Does he enjoy doing it? Does he resent me, because after all it's got to be a tedious job tracking my buying habits when I do so little shopping, or pity me?

I do not for a moment believe that I am particularly important in this scenario. I presumably have been chosen either arbitrarily, or for my ability to avoid the swelling middle of the bell curve and act as a kind of barometer of the unfashionable in a wide variety of consumer products. No, the center of the story is the man doing the job. He has to display a certain ingenuity at it, to avoid being noticed. I use a lot of cash (which some corporations seem to be trying to take away from me, too), don't buy much online, and use things till they wear out, so except for groceries I don't have a regular schedule. Even for groceries, though we go to the same store week after week, usually on the same day, we also make erratic trips to different stores to get different things. And yes, the stores at the more vegetarian-friendly end of the grocery spectrum do it to me, too - the store formerly known as SunHarvest recently stopped carrying my glucosamine, B-2, and worst of all, my chocolate-covered banana chips. But most of the time, I'm not buying at all. So this has got to be one of those nerve-wracking hurry-up-and-wait jobs.

I bet I'm not the only one being tracked, either. He may have two or three bellwethers to follow.

So the story could be one of those mid-century surrealist stories about the anonymity and pointlessness of the modern office job, some sort of Kafka riff in which neither the reader nor the protagonist is ever certain what's going on.

Or it could be primarily about his motivation to do the job. Presumably somebody is paying him; but is it in money? We tend to view money as the unit of value, but money is only meaningful in terms of the other satisfactions its possession enables. Does frustrating me in this way provide some other tangible benefit - prolong his life, perhaps? (But with a job so boring, with such weird hours, is that worthwhile?) Prolong the life of someone he loves - parent, child, spouse?

And, if he's working for another party and not somehow deriving his benefit directly from me, how is the coin he's paid in related to the way they profit?

It's all too murky. If I could find my antagonist's face, the rest of it would snap into place. But I tend to get bogged down in annoyance before I get there.

Idea Garage Sale: Bird's Eye Mysteries

A professor at Idaho State University has put together a project for aerial reconnaissance of the northwestern American forests, in order to look for Bigfoot. This strikes me as a good approach to the problem. I am reminded of an anecdote repeated to me by the operator of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum,
who is the natural depository of any and every passers-by's bigfoot story, of a small plane pilot overflying a clearcut area littered with felled, but not yet removed, trees. Below him he saw a truck driving down the road, and a large dark more or less humanoid shape paralleling it; when they came to an angle at which they could view each other, the humanoid threw itself to the ground in imitation of the logs!

My own belief is that Bigfoot is a good old-fashioned shape-changing fairy, but I approve of this project. If nothing else, it will take reams of footage of ordinary daily life in the flyover area, which is almost bound to discover unexpected behavior in known animals. The technology could also be adapted to security and search-and-rescue uses.

And of course fictional ones. Suppose you had a small self-propelled group of crypto-hunters put together one of these, or simply using a remote-controlled toy to survey an area in which they suspected a bigfoot, or chupacabras, or Goat Man, was hanging out. What human activity might be going on in the same area - secret activity, of people who will go to considerable lengths to keep from being found out?

You could write a crime drama around this premise. Or a more basic juvenile mystery, with the drone camera called into service to clear somebody of, say, vandalism. You could have mundane secrets cross tracks with exotic ones. The drone's operator could disappear, and his fate be puzzled out based on the evidence in the drone's camera. You could uncover Bigfoot - or bigfoot hoaxers - or both at once. You could have a comedy of errors, with the camouflaged drone mistaken for something exotic by a separate group of mystery-hunters, and the drone's deployers misreading their shots of the mystery-hunters' own cleverly disguised attempts to track the Thunderbird.

Why not?

Idea Garage Sale: The Desk

No idea why I suddenly thought of this one, out of the blue. But here it is.

Long, long ago I acted as teacher's aid to a teacher with no organizational skill whatsoever. This was my first experience of office work and I had no idea how to go about it, but I did my best. I seem to have blotted most of the experience from conscious memory, but I do remember that I started playing with a story in my head, about a desk that ate papers, office supplies, books, purses, bookbags, and, ultimately, teachers' aids. The only sign of them remaining would be a single hair hanging from a drawer, and a small burping sound.

I've gotten a lot of office experience since then, temping and permanent and personal, and I believe the core idea is probably valid. I remember the professor who, when talking to the person who was supposed to help him pack his office, led with: "Okay, the stuff in the chairs - that's current." I remember the restauranteur who got angry that a menu typist had gotten the price of a wine wrong in a new list, and the enormous stack of photocopies of old wine lists necessary to prove that the price hadn't changed once since he originally set it, several years before. (Why we had to photocopy the wine lists rather than just show him the file, I don't recall, but this is the same guy who got so angry he ranted for fifteen minutes with flecks of foam in the corners of his mouth without completing a sentence, over stamps on a mass-mailing being put on sideways). I remember bosses who would never keep anything, bosses who would never throw anything out, bosses who would never let anyone touch their desks and could never find anything, and desk after desk after desk that could easily have swallowed any number of teachers' aids.

The thing about horror is that it is so close to parody, I often can't tell the difference. And that pretty much sums up my attitude toward office work, too; I can't tell it from horror, or from parody.