Idea Garage Sale: A Walk on the Edges

I was always looking for that portal to another world.

Had I found it, a physical reality in a physical world, I probably would have been too chicken to go through. But I looked, anyway. I used to take long evening walks, beginning and ending in the all-too-familiar area around my house (though when I used alleys I got some intriguingly mysterious overgrown spaces even within that wasteland of ranch-style houses) and creating magical liminal spaces around the fringes, especially near the Concho River.

San Angelo, Texas, is not a promising-looking place for the imagination to roam, but one thing I learned in my career as an Air Force brat was that all places are boring and ugly, and all places are interesting and beautiful, depending on the personal investment and the distance. Everything is ugly when you're separated from it by a car. When you are close enough to be intimate, but for one social or physical barrier holding the spot just out of reach, many mundane things become beautiful and full of possibility. Vacant buildings, untended drainage easements brimming with wildflowers, culverts that were either flooded (during the October or May rains, if we got them that year) or dry as bones, gates to nowhere, haunted gardens - I found them and I made them into what I needed them to be. I almost touched a bird once. I trespassed more or less accidentally, and undetected, more often than I care to think about. I discovered the only newsstand in town where you could buy new fantasy and science fiction paperbacks. I learned that there's a large species of hummingbirds that sings - tweeter tweeter.

Does anybody let their middle- and high- school kids take these untended walks anymore? Do solitary children ride bikes out to explore? They have their phones, after all. They've had the warnings. With a little exercise of common sense, they should be fine, just like I was. For my own part, I don't remember many personal encounters, and those I remember have nothing of the threat about them even in hindsight. I stabbed myself on the palm by grabbing onto the wrong branch during one of my river explorations, and the lady I'd accidentally trespassed on cleaned the wound and was very nice to me.

But every parent I meet now is paranoid. We fear the people who want to hurt us and our children out of all proportion to their numbers, because the consequences of misplacing trust are so dire. But as a species we need to explore. We thrive on leaving our safe spaces to explore the spaces we cannot control, where danger is a possibility but far from a certainty, and returning, still safe, more or less, give or take a thorn in the palm. And if we never pick up the thorns, no one ever has a chance to be nice to us, do they? Kindness at home does not count; it is the job of home to be safe and kind to us. I never met kindness at school, of which the less said the better; school was soul-crushingly and inevitably dangerous because the predators of whom I was the natural prey gathered there in force, and I have no reason to think that this has changed. My walks were soul-expanding, marginally risky at most, and sprinkled with small, spontaneous kindness.

I was making my own portal and going through it every time I left the house.

How would a modern child accomplish this, in the paranoid cities of a world assumed to be unkind?

Is that a grown-up misperception on my part?

It is 2015. You are twelve. You need to find, or make, a portal to another world. You need to explore. You need liminal spaces, intimate mystery, a chance to encounter the kindness as well as the rudeness of strangers.

Where do you go? How do you get there? Who tries to stop you?

Answer me that. Write me the book. I want to know.

Idea Garage Sale: Scaling The Walls of Perception

Once in awhile I just have to face defeat.

My particular brand of Health Crap involves what I can only think of as an altered state. I experience the world at one remove, my thought processes slow down, and sometimes I get stuck with contradictory sensory input. For instance, one day not long ago I ate lunch at a table that I could clearly see was tilted at about 20 degrees, though my sense of touch, and the fact that my plate stayed put, indicated that it was level. Other times, I can feel myself drifting to left or right while walking, though I'm lined up visually on floor tiles or some other objectively straight indicator and know I'm adhering to a straight line. (You can imagine how difficult it is to sew like this; those slacks still aren't finished!)

Given my contention that weird phenomena are real phenomena rendered weird by the limitations of our perceptions, I ought to be able to do something literary with such gross changes in sensory processing, so intimately observed. Because the focus of my attention must shift to minutiae which are normally handled by autonomous systems, at such times it should, theoretically, be possible to perceive things continually happening, but normally overlooked. But what?

That's the sticking point. Since my experience of this state is a constant exercise in frustration, blocking me from getting anything done, it's hard for me to rephrase the situation to myself as an opportunity to see the normally unseen, or to imagine anything worth seeing. I'm too eager to get my normal perceptions back to dwell imaginatively in vertigo land for any longer than my body forces me to live here.

I am way too close to this idea to do more than to recognize that there must be one around.

Either danger, or wonder, must live at this fringe of reality in order to engage the character and the reader. I lean toward danger because I can't appreciate wonder when I don't dare turn my head lest it fall off or go spinning uncontrollably out the door. But it has to be a slow danger, because quick ones require head-turning. The involvement of weird angles implies some incomprehensible Lovecraftian horror, but it ought to be more small-scale than that. Something frightening, or glorious, or both, on a personal scale.

What about it? Anybody got a notion what it might be?

Idea Garage Sale, Reversed

So, I'm scheduled to be part of a coordinated blogging effort on behalf of the Andre Norton Award, as detailed at Erin Underwood's blog. My contribution will be on the 11th.

I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.

So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.

Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.

Idea Garage Sale: Solicitation for Donations

It occurred to me while I was cleaning the bathroom yesterday that Sunday's my birthday, dammit, I shouldn't have to work and people should be giving me presents. And since I now have three whole followers (one of whom I don't even know personally; wow) and two people in the gaming group say they read this, and since my guiding principle is that ideas are common as dirt, they should be able to generate a sale idea or two in the comment section.

So, what about it, y'all? You don't have to go to the lengths I do and it doesn't have to be a well-rounded or a complete idea; just something that's been rattling around in your head awhile that you don't expect to ever do anything with. It doesn't have to be a story idea, either. A picture you know you'll never draw, a business you know you'll never start, a campaign you wish somebody else would DM. I know you've got 'em. Everybody does.

And if you don't feel like celebrating my birthday today, celebrate E.B. White's. It's his birthday too! Also, this is the 151st anniversary of the publication of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's least funny novel - no, wait, Hard Times is oddly devoid of comic characters, too. But nobody has to read it in English class. (I should reread it. I might enjoy it more now than I did when I was 13.)

And the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird. Here's a story we all wish could be told about us. Once Harper Lee, who made a steady enough income with Mockingbird she never had to get a soul-sucking day job or write anything else, was at a cocktail party and somebody clueless asked what she did. She answered: "I wrote a book." Clueless raised his eyebrows and said: "A book?"

She replied: "Well, it was a really good book."