Idea Garage Sale: The Transgender Western

Seriously. Since we just established that I haven't written it, somebody out there should. Somebody transgender, for choice.

Female crossdressing is a standard trope in the genre and happened a lot in history, but in fiction it ends with the woman declaring her heterosexuality and returning to female garb. As it sometimes did in real life. But not always.

And this could easily be reversed, and undoubtedly was, but since women led more circumscribed lives it doesn't inspire adventure fiction. But feminine "men," masculine "women," and intersex and genderfluid people have always existed. People must have changed their effective gender by changing clothes quite a lot, during time periods when gender was so strongly coded that nobody, ever, looked for other gender clues without a reason.

You'll need some kind of plot beyond that, of course, but if you read in the western genre, you know the plots and it should, once you consider your character, be clear at once how and where and into which plot this character would fit. Let's hear the story of the schoolmarm who used to be a cowboy, the widow rancher whose high collars mask an adam's apple, the orphan whose choices include which equally-possible face to turn to the world, the escaped slave whose description in the advertisement cites the wrong sex.

Idea Garage Sale: Economy of Inspiration

Not to toot my own horn, but I've often thought that the Switching Well concept has a certain abstract beauty, in that, baldly stated, it generates an infinity possibility of story.

The core concept is: "Two girls swap places across 100 years, without moving geographically."

I did this in San Antonio, and had nothing past that concept and the two anchor points. I learned everything I could about the past anchor point and put a whole lot more effort into understanding the present anchor point than I normally do, and what I learned generated the story. If I had been living in Atlanta, or Detroit, or Paris, or Myanmar, or Panora, Iowa; or started writing in 2015, or 1950, or 2102; it would have been a completely different story.

If you started working on this idea right now, where you live, with a pair of kids who look a lot like you, the end result would be less similar to Switching Well than Twilight is to Dracula; than Hunger Games is to Divergent; than Heroes of Olympus is to Harry Potter is to Jane Yolen's Wizard Hall.

For that matter, Switching Well isn't particularly similar to Penelope Lively's Charlotte Sometimes, which has Clare and Charlotte swapping across a shorter time period, alternating days, and being mistaken for each other, when you read them side by side. And yet, stating the premise of each book, it's clear that the Switching Well idea was not by any means original to me, who read Charlotte Sometimes in junior high.

Originality does not mean what you think it means. We all work within traditions.

Execution is the once and future everything. Steal an idea, make it your own.

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: Talking Animals of the Apocalypse

No way I'll ever use this one, but I bet somebody could do it right.

This was a story-dream. The post-apocalyptic dystopia was going on, and one of the features was, that anthropomorphic animals societies were A Thing. The totalitarian rulers were all what the dream was calling cis-humans (I know I'm appropriating the term cis here, way out of original context of contrasting the cisgender from the transgender, but it works pretty well to express the idea of "what society treats as the norm"!) while the oppressed classes were both the cis-human poor and modified animals much like the Talking Animals in Narnia - larger than their non-talking counterparts, with humanlike intelligence that didn't interfere with the specializations of their animals from which they derived. I specifically remember wild foxes and domestic goats. The "wild" talking animals lived separate from humans and the "domestic" talking animals were integrated as equals into the poor human communities, who regarded them as human equivalents; but the ruling classes regarded both kinds of talking animals as animals. So that at one point, for instance, one of them shot and skinned an intelligent fox because she wanted to wear the fur. At another point, the protagonists were saved from patrolling oppressors because the goats fooled them into overlooking the humans they were looking for - the goats were not considered seriously as intelligent agents.

So the oppressed are all working together, right? Not quite. It turned out that the Resistance had a number of different factions, all made up of cis-humans and intelligent animals (hmm, does tranimals work as a term here?) working independently and with little knowledge of each other. Something was preventing them from communicating and coordinating. Not from cooperating - the main thrust of the dream involved following the attempts of two parties who crossed paths in the field and jeopardized each other's missions to clean up the resultant mess, carry out both missions, and keep everyone safe from the oppressors who were suddenly swarming everywhere.

And there was some sort of boarding school that was becoming the locus of resistance because it was one of the few places that people from different communities could meet face to face? But the boarding school taught only cis-humans and was run by the oppressing class. (Think, Indian boarding schools of 20th century America, where Indian children were taken to be brainwashed out of their culture.)

I will never use this, because I don't even like dystopian fiction as a rule. Real life is as dystopian as I care to get and a little more, thank you! But if you came up with a premise that made the tranimals work, the whole story would work, and would fall into place.

BTW, the cis-humans? Should all be brown. Because in the future, we will all be brown.

Idea Garage Sale: Post-Valentine's Day Sale

I don't read romances, though I like a love story in with my other kind of story as much as the next person (and spend a surprising amount of time dating my sims), but that doesn't mean I can't come up with romance story ideas, so in the wake of V-Day let's spit a few out. I leave it to the genre aficianados out there to determine whether they're viable in the market place, or have been done to death.

1) A workplace Valentine; a florist and a chocolatier who have to work punishingly long hours and are both exhausted and sick to death of traditional Valentine merchandise want to bring romance into (or back into) their lives together, so have to come up with non-traditional methods tailored to each other.

2) A retirement home Valentine: love is in the air among the widows and widowered, the sick and the well, the golden couples and the committed lifelong singles.

3) My nerdy Valentine. Damon gave me pink polyhedral dice. How do other people who fall well off the bell curve of marketed responses express their affection? To be played straight, not for laughs, because in the end, we're all nerds about something.

4) My incompatible Valentine. The bickering couple with gobs of chemistry find true love - with other people, split up, and become excellent friends.

5) My dystopian Valentine. The zombies are abroad, the economy has collapsed, starvation and worse stalks the land. Love is still essential - but is there any place for romance?

Ideas are easy. Writing is fun. Understanding the market, recognizing which ideas are worth cultivating when - that's hard!

Idea Garage Sale: Secrets of the Subculture

Psst...want to write in your favorite genre?

Step 1: Spend a few months reading the genre and nothing else.
Step 2: When not reading, go about your normal life.
Step 3: See the genre overlay on your life! Particularly on the parts of your life that create subcultures.

We all belong to multiple subcultures, beginning with our families. Your work circle and your leisure circle are probably not the same and don't function under the same social rules. You probably have friends from both circles who find each other mutually incomprehensible, which will help you find the line of demarcation. The craft shows you attend (as a crafter, as your crafter mom's assistant, as a buyer) on the weekends combine into their own little world with politics, scandals, romance, and tragedy; as does the law office where you make your living. Whenever I go to the farmer's market I get a brief little glimpse of a vast network of hardworking and surprisingly diverse people, who appear to be in direct competition (selling exactly the same things) and yet are also mutually supportive - trading among themselves, fetching each other coffee, making change for each other.

If you read enough romance novels, with the idea in the back of your mind that you will and can write one, you'll begin to see how romance could bloom at the farmer's market between the daughter struggling to keep her family farm viable and the naive organic-horticulture newbie.

If you read enough science fiction, you'll start thinking of ways that nanorobotics will change the working conditions in your real estate office, or imagining the particular challenges of peddling real estate on the moon.

If you read enough mysteries, you'll imagine what it would mean for everybody on the RenFaire circuit (where you go every year to help out your Rennie aunt) if a serial killer starts leaving garbed bodies on the jousting field, and invent ingenious ways to kill and be killed with turkey legs, corset laces, and blunt souvenir swords.

Trust me. You too will soon have more ideas than you know what to do with. The problem will be to pick one. You'll have the best results with subcultures in which you participate as an insider, not as audience; but if an idea knocks hard enough, it's worth going out of your way to become an insider.

I promise.