Idea Garage Sale: A Day Late and a Dollar Short, or Farming Out

Yesterday was just One of Those Days, but there's still no shortage of ideas out there.

One thing that has struck me, doing market research for the short story project, is how specific many modern markets are, to the point that many don't seem to me worth writing for on spec, but only with a contract in hand. That, however, is the perspective of someone with a few publications under her belt and a sufficiency of her own projects to work on without undertaking somebody else's concept. For someone in need of credits, and perhaps a need for exterior motivation, these markets no doubt look much more reasonable.

Consider The Legacy Anthology. The publishers have a concept for an assemblage of individual stories creating a larger story. This cross between a "round robin story" and "shared world anthology" strikes me as problematic, but if they can find twelve different authors who can slot together well enough while retaining enough of their individuality to justify the extra labor, more power to them.

And then there's The First Line, which gives you the first line of the story, a deadline, and a flat-rate payment on acceptance; and you supply everything else, sink or swim. Well, the chance to get paid for doing writing exercises does have its appeal...

Or The Metaphysical Circus, which pays an attractive word rate, but requires that all submitters be signed up to their e-mail list; plus their guidelines include the statement: "At their heart, such stories contain an ontological dilemma..." I'm not sure I'm up for ontological dilemmas, and although "Thou Shalt Read the Magazine" is the number-one commandment for freelancers submitting to periodical markets, I personally am unwilling to join a club in the hope of getting paid. It's probably somebody's ideal environment, though.

In short, if you want to write for publication, you need to keep up with the markets; and if you can't find a market for what you've got, nothing whatever is wrong with writing something to fit. I have before now written such a story, not sold it to the original market, reworked it a bit, and resold it elsewhere. It's an old freelancer dodge.

But how, you ask, do you keep up with the markets?

Once upon a time I'd have told you about printed market guides; but in the world of online publishing these are always behind the times. It's part of your professional job to actively watch out for new publications, and keep up with changes in old ones; but no one can subscribe to every prospective market, much less read them all. Where there's a need, ideally, there's an entrepreneur, and paying for a service that keeps up with the kinds of markets you're comfortable writing for is a legitimate tax-deductible expense. (As are any subscriptions you maintain to markets to which you submit.) I'm subscribed to Market Maven, from which I've shaken loose those examples, and if it doesn't suit you, now you know such a thing exists, you can start looking for one better tailored to your needs.

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: Summertime

It's summer - ice tea and okra and catfish and peaches and cherries; air like a blanket until the storm pushes through; yards that turn into jungles overnight; zucchini too small to harvest one morning and as big as your leg the next; empty streets, or gridlock on the way to the lake, the beach, the shade; chlorine and cocoa butter and stacks of books and music that you barely notice but which will, when heard next winter, suddenly flash sunlight behind your eyes -

Let's have a summer book.

Not one about a real summer, mind. One about the ideal of summer. About freedom: exploring and creating and testing your limits, about learning what you want to learn the way you want to learn it, without teachers or parents riding you. About friends who don't have to be perfect but who are at least on the same page as you, with roughly the same goals and either a general agreement about how to accomplish them, or an alternative method that can compete in a friendly fashion. Lupe thinks her method of training the dog is best; Leti thinks hers is - well, both girls have dogs and let's find out. The twins both wanted a canoe and they got one, so they take it out every day and take turns being captain and deciding the agenda and doing all the planning for their trips of discovery and recreation.

Or, the starship's going to take three months to reach the outpost Mom's been stationed to, and this is a well-honed routine; the kids can be safely turned loose to explore, happens every trip, the ship's crew is used to it and the ship was designed so parents wouldn't have to worry about their kids (but oh, something is different this trip; this is the trip when the Big Thing happens and only the kids have the information necessary to figure out what's going on...)

Or, the grownups are off doing their thing, working, and the kids persuade them that they don't have to go to that stupid daycare place this year, they can stay home alone during the day and they'll even keep the house nice. And the strategy for keeping the house nice is, to never be in it - to go all the places they've wanted to go but never can because the grownups are too busy to take them, or in some cases don't even think it's a good place to go, and get home every day to be clean and smiling and uninjured with supper started when the folks get home, none the wiser. They have to cut it close a few times, and then there's this Complication that arises, the person they meet or the information they uncover which they know the grownups would make them leave alone, but they can't. It wouldn't be right.

Genre as generally conceived by book publishers is irrelevant. This is about atmosphere and a particular intellectual/emotional opennes. The term "beach read" has come to mean a particular kind of potboiler; the books I'm thinking of aren't potboilers, but they are good to read on the beach; and they make you want to get up and do things once you finish the chapter.

Swallows and Amazons, Treasure Island, and all the Stratemeyer syndicate books ever written are summer books. Lots of Diana Wynne Jones's books are, too, even many of the completely unrelaxed ones dealing with big stakes, like Eight Days of Luke. The reader is relaxing; the characters need not be. The characters can be as busy as corporate lawyers, even struggling for survival like Brian in the Hatchet books. But they must be competent or become so, they must have perfect liberty within the framework of the setting, and they must be fun to read about with a big bag of potato chips and a cold drink.

Idea Garage Sale: For the Entrepreneurs

Not all ideas are for stories. I often have a vague wish to be able to put a painting, a business, a program, or something else that I haven't anything like the dedication to make reality out there into the world.

For instance, last Sunday Damon and I were watching what we thought at the time was the finale of Crisis, which we started watching because it had Gillian Anderson in it and kept watching because it is, in fact, a pretty good script. (I have one or two specific beefs but that's not here nor there.) Last Sunday was also the decisive game in some sort of championship thing for the NBA, which the San Antonio Spurs won.

I love San Antonio. I think that, as professional sports teams go, the Spurs are largely inoffensive. They are at least not a bunch of crooks, whiners, abusers, and entitled self-important bullies like some teams I could name (and the entire player base of some sports I could name). But if we'd cared about the damn championship we'd have been taping Crisis and at the arena with the rest of the locals, now, wouldn't we? So we were fit to be tied when, fifteen minutes from the end of the show, when the kidnapper giving Gillian Anderson instructions through her earbud told her to shut up and sit still, and the drugged superweapon soldier she'd gotten into the courtroom stood up behind the guilty CIA director's wife, and started revealing things the CIA director was willing to commit murder to keep everyone (especially Congress and the President) from knowing, and the station overrode the signal with the news that the Spurs had just won and started switching us between commentators saying nothing, nothing, and more nothing, and promising us interviews with people who had even more nothing to say, we were ready to blow a gasket.

So here's an idea for you tech wizards out there. No a story, just an app. One which, if it were available, would be worth the price of any device it was loaded on. (I currently own no devices.) I want an app which allows you to override pre-emptions, so that when stuff like this happens, the moment I realize that the "breaking news" has nothing whatsoever to do with the world I live in, I can go back to what I was watching. Also, so that when something I want to watch overlaps with some stupid game or other, whose length is unpredictable, I will be able to start my show on time! Somebody out there, please, make this happen!

Thanks to the marvels of internet technology, I did get to watch the final 15 online the next day; but it would have been so much better to have been able to watch it straight through. (Also, it turned out that wasn't the finale, though it felt like one; two more episodes aired back-to-back last night and brought it to a mostly satisfactory conclusion. Though I don't buy that the icily competent, unflappable Alicia Dutton was in it for Tahiti or that red-headed jerk. I feel cheated that she died before her character was properly revealed.)

Another enterprise I'd like to see is the Omnivore Cafe, a restaurant with two mix-and-match menus: Carnivore, and Herbivore. (If that sounds familiar, I assure you that a) I thought of this years before Cyn Smith wrote Tantalize and invented Sanguini's "Predator or Prey?" menus; and b) I'm thinking in terms of a place serving office workers in the middle of the day; a very different atmosphere.) Nutritional information would be supplied on each dish, which would be prepared as nearly saltlessly as practical, with choices of salt types (iodized or sea salt) and other seasonings at the table, dressings and other trimmings on the side rather than dumped onto the main course (and no nasty lemon wedges on my tea glass, waste of lemons, grumble). There'd be a Dairy counter (so you could get dairy products a la carte, for the convenience of the kosher as well as the non-Vegan) and a Bakery counter; and the bakery counter would have nutless versions of everything that came with nuts. Some items, like hamburgers, would be available in Low-Fat and Extra Greasy incarnations. And every day there'd be two iterations of Anything Soup available, made up of the previous day's leftovers, one meaty and one meat-free.

In short, I want a restaurant absolutely everybody can eat at, without these endless negotiations that make some of us such a pain the neck to eat out with.

These two things seem to me to be obvious, urgent needs. But I wouldn't know how to go about making either happen.

Idea Garage Sale: The Poltergeist Problem Novel

So, let's talk about poltergeists, because I've been reading books about them - non-fiction books, because that is the only decent kind, generally speaking.

All generalizations are false, but the odds are good that the only good fictional poltergeist stories I've ever read are ones you haven't heard of or, if you've heard of them, didn't know had any supernatural element. Like, The Almost Year, by Florence Engel Randall, which was published in 1971 and is about a poor black girl living for nine months with a wealthy white family, and that was where the focus was in its promotional material. This was a huge mistake - it was promoted as a problem novel and I didn't go for those in 1971. And as a problem novel about a black child written by a white woman it was and is problematical - but as a poltergeist novel, it is flawless, precisely because it is problematical.

The thing about poltergeists is, they happen - don't make any mistake about that! I don't know what they are, and neither does anybody else. They needn't, even, all be the same thing. The word applies to a configuration of disruptive events, involving physical effects with no obvious or even probable physical cause. Any given one might be hoax, fairy, repressed emotion breaking out as telekinesis, hysterical misperception, series of mindbogglingly improbabl accidents, or all of the above - or, none of the above, given the unliklihood of our finite minds framing the question correctly to recognize all the possibilities. So they are a frustrating, but flexible, set of phenomena, able to produce almost any effect your fiction might require.

And this is why the most famous depictions of them - Poltergeist the movie, most notably - are so unsatisfactory. They treat the phenomena as the important, interesting problem, and the solution as a dramatic fight against some external force. And that is just not so. A poltergeist is not, in itself, a problem. It is a symptom of a problem.

Because the other thing about poltergeists is, they don't happen in happy families. They don't happen in loudly, obviously, blatantly dysfunctional families. They happen in families where somebody (or multiple somebodies) is under a little too much stress and the problem is being skated around.

The parapsychological theory of RSPK - Recurrent Spontaneous PsychoKinesis - was dreamed up to account for this. The idea is that psychological tensions are released, by people who happen to have a lot more psychokinetic ability than most people, through unconscious psychic tantrums. Since most poltergeists have one "focus person" on whom most of the phenomena center, and who is often actively persecuted by them, the theory is that the focus person is unconsciously engaging in attention-seeking, acting out, or self-harm that she refuses to engage in consciously, for the very same reasons that attention seeking, acting out, and self-harm usually happen.

I'm not being blithely feminist in that choice of pronoun, by the way. According to the literature, the most common poltergeist focus is an adolescent girl. This meshes nicely with the RSPK theory, since girls are so much more likely to be encouraged to repress the kinds of "energy" (i.e. sexual feelings, anger, and resentment) that the theory assumes fuels the RSPK.

The problem with the RSPK theory, of course, is that the best evidence that psychokinesis even exists involves the subtle non-random behavior of random things like dice and subatomic particles. It's a huge leap from rolling a statistically unlikely number of sixes to starting fires, throwing rocks, levitating beds, or creating a vocal apparition of a talking mongoose. But it does focus attention where it belongs, in fiction - on the unhappiness and tension in the house, underneath the phenomenon. Resolve those issues, and the poltergeist resolves itself, whatever its mechanism; and this is why so many true poltergeist stories peter out with no climax. The people involved are willing to talk about the phenomena; they are not willing to talk about the personal situations that created the conditions that enabled the phenomena. Many family members may not even know them - with nineteen children and servants, the Reverend Samuel Wesley was unlikely to be aware of all the stresses at large in his home at Epworth Rectory, or the measures taken to relieve and master them, and even less likely to record them for posterity at the same time that he was recording the disruptions caused by "Old Jeffrey," the poltergeist that both tormented and amused his family for some months.

Another way that real-life poltergeist stories end is with a failure to resolve. The problems become more and more overt - exacerbated by the investigation of the phenomena, to the point that a focus may feel obliged to produce phenomena. That way lies the full range of coping syndromes; the abuse of recreational substances; the making of poor decisions; even, in the most spectacular poltergeist ever, The Bell Witch, in murder by poltergeist.

A good poltergeist book is not a special effects horrorfest. Movies can do that if it needs doing. A good poltergeist novel would illuminate the personal parts, the dynamics of the household, the stresses and coping mechanisms that investigators only guess at. We can invade the privacy of fictional characters as we would never dare invade that of real people. Are poltergeists and drug abuse the same behavior at their cores? To face up to your poltergeist, must you face up to yourself? What if the focus is a shared one (the Bell Witch murdered father John Bell, tormented daughter Betsy Bell, and was kindness personified to mother Lucy Bell) - does this indicate a codependency? And what happens, in any relationship born of stress, if one party is making a strong effort to resolve the problem everyone else ignores?

I can't think of a single problem novel that wouldn't be improved by plopping a poltergeist into it and seeing what happens.

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.

Idea Garage Sale: Redirect

So I'm going to be lazy this morning, but you'll thank me for it.

The blog Disability in Kidlit addresses subjects of vital literary interest, and in particular the recent post Discussion #3: What Would You Like to See More of? is chock-full of brilliance. Like for example, from S.E. Smith:

I don’t want to see the disability version of the whitewashed form of diversity sometimes seen with authors trying to write characters of colour where a one-off mention is made to a character being Black or Latina/o and it never comes up again, depriving characters of cultural context–I want to see a character’s disability mentioned and playing a role in the narrative, but not as its own character. (A wheelchair user who’s a hacker, for example, and gets frustrated with the stairs at the local hackerspace. A schizophrenic character who thinks her meds need adjustment when she really is seeing ghosts. A D/deaf or HoH teen witch who’s pissed about uncaptioned YouTube videos. Get imaginative!)

That bolded bit is brilliant!

Of course, you'd have to know quite a bit about schizophrenics and schizophrenia, and by that I don't just mean library research. Knowledge can be acquired. I've known a few schizophrenics, but not intimately. Enough to know that they can be annoying to be around, if they don't accept or understand their own condition, but that if they're on top of their illness, the accommodations others have to make around them are no more onerous than adjusting to someone with mobility problems: i.e., not onerous enough to make a fuss over. A writer with schizophrenia (Virginia Woolf was, remember, so don't try to tell me that having this condition is enough to disqualify one as a writer!), who works with mental and emotional conditions, or with a close family member with the condition would be in the best position to do so. But it's not impossible for a sufficiently dedicated researcher with no direct experience, yet. After all, a person with a disability is simply someone who doesn't mesh perfectly with the world around her - and who hasn't felt that way at least occasionally?

And it could be awesome.

And enlightening.

And completely mutilated in the blockbuster Hollywood movie adaptation; but of what awesome and enlightening work is this not true?

Anyway, you the reader or I the blogger may not be up to carrying out some of the specific ideas presented, but this should be enough to get you thinking. Because these are reasonable desires and the road to fulfillment is wide open. And creativity springs from limitation.

(And bookmark or follow that blog while you're about it.)

Idea Garage Sale: The Alternative Life

One reason I read, and write, and play the kinds of games I do is that one life doesn't seem like enough. No one can do everything she wants to do; and most things one would like to do have either long patches of unrewarding dullness, steep learning curves, or circumstantial limitations like, say, physical impossibility. I can't live in the Pleistocene, I don't have the temperament for academia, and my body is being a bugger about letting me garden, let alone do avocational archeology which is theoretically within my reach. Like everyone else, I have to focus on overcoming the dullness, learning curves, and circumstantial limitations of the one thing that matters most. Which is storytelling. Which encompasses all other possible lives, as it happens.

The conventional wisdom says: "Write what you know." But how boring would that be? I say, "Write what you'd like to know," and then you have an excuse to go find out.

So you decide to write about who you'd like to be. Say, someone capable of sailing solo around the world. Not in a race or anything. Just sailing, between the lonely sea and the sky, with flying fishes jumping on board in certain latitudes, going ashore in Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands and it's all very pleasant, and gives you an excuse to read up on Tahiti and Singapore and remote Arctic islands, but while you're reading up you realize that an endless travelogue makes poor reading and the parts of the research that draw you on, that excite you, perversely that make the concept attractive, aren't pleasant at all. A story is about characters in conflict. If you want this alternate life of yours to be worth reading about, you'll have to disrupt your alternate self's good time.

So you start with all the reasons you do not, in fact, sail solo around the world, and figure out how your alternate self copes with them, and why it's worth it to her.

For starters, you probably wouldn't find this fantasy compelling enough to write about if you couldn't sail, but odds are good you're not a competent enough sailor to go solo. Your alternate self must be or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe, if she had compelling enough circumstances; if she didn't expect to be alone, or if something is pushing her away from her native shores hard enough that death by incompetence in the watery deep seems preferable.

You probably don't have enough money, either, or any way to make your round-the-world tour self-supporting. Your character must have one or the other or she wouldn't be doing it - would she? Maybe. What if, instead of being richer than you, she's poorer? What if that push factor is enough to make stealing a yacht (fully stocked) a good enough short term solution that she decided to postpone thinking about the long-term?

Whoa, wait a minute, you don't want to be a thief!

Okay, maybe she doesn't steal it exactly. Maybe she salvages it. Maybe she's out in a little dinghy, the only place she can get away from - Who? What? Something terrible - an abusive family situation? The snowballing effects of some small mistake, made in the wrong place at the wrong time, drawing the attention of the wrong person? Think about that later. She's in her dinghy on the morning after a storm and there's the yacht, all its lines slack, drifting but sound, and she hails and gets no answer. It's abandoned, or maybe there's a corpse washing around in the hold, or maybe the only inhabitant is a seasick cat. But there's food. There's charts. There's fishing tackle. It's a simple enough rig and a small enough yacht that she thinks she could figure out how to handle it alone. And then she could just sail away from all her troubles...

But of course the troubles follow her. Either physically, if it's a thriller; or mentally, because we don't leave our troubles behind, we cling to them even as we run away. If she was in an abusive relationship she has the scars of that. If she's running from someone, someone must be chasing her. If she's made one mistake, she's likely to make another. And that yacht, though I believe legally hers by right of salvage, wasn't always abandoned or empty. Someone else was sailing her for a reason, and is no longer doing so for a reason, and those reasons can present their own challenges in addition to the ones she brings with her. And of course, there's the ocean to deal with. Being alone in a storm. Seasickness. Access to fresh water. The endless work of sailing, which is bound to entail more than you or she at first envision. Fetching up in foreign parts with no money and no passport.

And by now she's not an alternate you anymore. She's something much better - she's herself. A character. Someone who can give you an entree into the alternate life you can't live, and be more interesting than you.

Idea Garage Sale: Miracles, Mistakes, and Lies

I'm tired of leafing through my old notes; fortunately, I got a Fortean Times this week. FT 289 (the people on the newsgroup are already discussing FT 290, but they're mostly British and can get it regular mail, while my issues have to hitch a ride on a tramp steamer or something) contains, on page 10, in a "Back from the Dead" round-up article, the story of an Argentinian woman who was told her premature baby was stillborn. Twelve hours later, they decided they wanted to say good-by properly, so the hospital staff pulled the frost-covered body out of the morgue drawer. Her mother touched her hand, and the baby opened her eyes.

Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.

But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.

The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...

The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...

Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!

Idea Garage Sale: Alternity

One doesn't see much, in juvenile and YA literature, of alternate history. Not even "The South Won the Civil War" or "The Axis Won World War II" You do sometimes get parallel universes, but they don't tend to focus on the splitting point, or even identify it. I first encountered the concept in science fiction and fantasy originally published for adults, which in many cases (especially back then) is "really" YA. I think Silverberg was the first author I saw do it. The Gate of Worlds, that would be. No, wait, I take that back! Joan Aiken had a whole string of alternate world books, in which the Stuarts ruled England in the 19th century and Hanoverians were a constant threat. I keep forgetting that's how it was, because my favorite of the books - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - doesn't get into that at all. Besides, it's not as if I've troubled myself to keep track of the kings and queens of Britain.

There's two major questions we must ask ourselves before embarking on an alternate history. One is, "What's the decision point that changes?" And the second is, "How many worlds do we put into the story?" Because although the game of alternate history requires that it all be played straight, as Aiken does it, with the alternate world (or alternity as I prefer to call it for short) assumed to be the only one, this is not necessarily the best, most interesting way to do it for young people. The great fun of the alternate history game, after all, is opposing the known to the unknown - it is like this, but change this one thing, and it might be like this instead. The point is lost on an audience that isn't familiar enough with the turning point; and either a sufficiently obscure turning point, or a reader who hasn't done that unit yet, will be lost more than found.

The Big Two, as mentioned above, are the American Civil War and World War II, because those are huge events that loom large in relatively recent history; but they've been done so often, and have such obvious line-ups of heroes and villains, that from an author's or a serious history student's point of view they're not much fun. Personally I'd rather get into less-often asked questions, like: What if Tecumseh had succeeded? What if Fannin had been in charge at the Alamo? What if Napoleon won at Waterloo? What if the English were kicked out of North America and the dominant powers on the continent during the 18th and 19th centuries derived from the Spanish, French, and Dutch? What if Boudicca had driven out the Romans in Nero's time? Or the Bolshevik Revolution failed in Russia? How would the modern world look in any of those situations?

Those are all a juicy lot of questions you could spend months and years exploring, and which could create great backgrounds, particularly for genre juvenile fiction. Think of all the books about pioneers American children read, set on the Mississippi or during the gold rush or in the post-Civil War settlement boom, and how different they would look with an Empire founded by Tecumseh, or with the Dutch and Spanish former colonies dominating the market! But the natural audience for these stories would need to have the joke explained, and nothing spoils a joke like explaining it.

This is where communication between worlds would come in, which requires a different sort of story entirely. In such a work, the hero/heroine would be in contact with an alternate-world counterpart (it just occurred to me that it could be an opposite sex clone! Which just opens up more doors in this already too-open environment), and the two versions of this person - call it Chris, a nice gender-neutral name - would have similar problems, related to the mechanism that allows them to bridge the universes. Which of course brings up the question, How do they bridge the universes? Can they only communicate? Can they observe? Can they cross over physically and if so, do they have to replace each other, or can they meet each other directly? Is there perhaps a limbo in which they can meet each other?

So while having both sides of the alternity open provides necessary exposition without much fuss, it creates its own whole new can of worms; as if working out the logical results of the single major change the author posits weren't a big enough one.

You can see why I still haven't done this. Too many choices, not enough investment in any of them.

Idea Garage Sale: Falling through Time

So Damon and I had a good day yesterday, driving up to Austin, watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and hitting a couple of stores that aren't on our regular Austin run. The movie is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Making the Chauvet images available to the general public is enough, all by itself, to justify Herzog's existence. It must be odd to know (and he can't not have known) that you're doing the most significant work you will ever do, while you're doing it. The movie is trance-inducing, a good-faith effort to assist the viewer in falling backward through time, and does not flinch from the ways in which people - Herzog himself, archeologists, the perfumer/spelunker - make themselves ridiculous trying to articulate mental states that are essentially incommunicable.

Authors should not flinch from this risk, either; but authors have the advantage over workers in other media that, as people whose tools are words, the basic units of communication between humans, we have the potential to figure out how to communicate that state. We cannot hope to communicate it to everyone; but sufficient hard work and application of craft gives us a shot at connecting to some.

Anyone can see that a story adheres to the footprint of the 8-year-old boy beside the footprint of the wolf at one point in Chauvet. A lazy writer would go with the boy-and-his-dog theme; but the writer who wants to take the time journey must do more than that. Even if the boy-and-his-dog theme is what you wind up with, it should be chosen deliberately and with care, after investigating factors such as these:

What is the basis for saying the footprint is that of an 8-year-old boy? Might it be an older, or younger, or a girl?

The archeologist who brings up the footprint, in the manner of archeologists, pushes past the boy-and-his-dog theme to point out that the wolf could have been stalking the boy, or that the two prints could have occurred days, years, even millenia apart. The cave yields no data to pin that down. Neither boys nor wolves are solitary creatures - where are the other footprints?

What do the animal bones (mostly cave bear) and traces of other species in the caves tell us about how they were used by all the local fauna over time, not just humans? What do paleontology and surface archeology tell us about the context of the paintings?

How does the sense of awe and connection to past humanity relate to the equally inarticulable sensation of uncovering the old layers of wallpaper in my back porch? Or turning up traces of past, equally unknown lives in the backs of drawers or behind the wall - the cracked doll face, the enigmatic postcard, the chipped marble? We call one sensation awe and the other nostalgia, as if there were a qualitative difference - but is there? I don't think so.

Consider the theory I mentioned in one of my earliest posts - that most surviving cave paintings were done by adolescents playing around in caves. The argument that the caves were too inaccessible for such an origin doesn't hold up when one considers the inaccessible places where Kilroy has been, where gang sign appears, where Mike Loves Emily inside a heart.

Do the research, stay aware of the world. The story will find you.

Idea Garage Sale: Black History Month

So anyway I'm reading a biography of David Ruggles and -

What's that, you never heard of him? Actually you have if you've read one of Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies. He's the free black abolitionist who advised and assisted Douglass during the New York phase of his escape from slavery. I didn't know that either when I picked the book up. The title attracted me: David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. I've been interested in the Underground Railroad since I was nine and first heard of it, and nothing is more attractive than a book about some aspect of an interest which is not generally covered.

The reason for this is simple: These books are idea factories. I'm only on page 79 and look what I've got:

Born free in Connecticut, Ruggles lived in an integrated neighborhood near the family of his parents' former owner and attended a school where one of the teachers promoted the idea that free blacks should recolonize Africa. Imagine a guidance counselor advising you that you can't expect to succeed in your country of origin and should, in your own best interest, go someplace else! A major conflict in the abolitionist platform was between those who called for an end to slavery and those who called for ending slavery by shipping all the slaves to Africa to Christianize it. This resulted in Liberia, a country whose history should be better known. Broadly speaking, black abolitionists regarded colonization proponents as part of the problem; a parallel between the colonization platform and the policy of relocating Cherokees from Georgia was explicitly drawn by them.

In his youth he got into trouble with another young black man whose family was less well-connected and who therefore got sucked into the prison-crime cycle, while Ruggles got off lightly and went on to be a sailor, storekeeper, and activist.

During the Revolution, Connecticut offered freedom in exchange for military service, and self-created a sizable population of black Patriots; in other colonies, the British were the ones offering that deal.

In the 1790s, barely 5% of Connecticut's white male population could vote; not much difference between being black and being poor white.

From p. 24: "In 1798, in a sensational moment, a mixed-race mob protected the eight-year-old James Mars from a Virginia slave catcher."

In colonial times, slaves regularly elected governors and kings in the spring.

Ship captains didn't check papers; a fifth to a quarter of coastal crews were black and seafaring was a good option for male runaway slaves as well as free blacks.

Under the 1808 Fugitive Slave Law and New York's pro-slavery judges, "kidnappers regularly came to the city and grabbed any black whose appearance resembled their quarry." If you've ever read a runaway slave advertisement, you'll know just how big a pool of people the descriptions would have opened up to this form of human trafficking.

Free blacks sometimes turned escaped slaves over to slave catchers for rewards.

Riots against slave catching were a regular form of resistance.

Consumer activism has a longer history than I thought; Ruggles advertised that his sugar was "free sugar," i.e. not produced by slave labor, and this was a selling point for abolitionist housewives.

"[White abolitionist Elizur] Wright chronicled the actions of Richard P. Haxall of Richmond, Virginia, who had taken a seven-year-old schoolboy, Henry Scott, off the city streets and hauled him before Richard Riker, the city recorder, who was about to condemn the lad into slavery. Wright intervened and stopped the proceedings even after Riker ordered the boy to jail until the matter could be settled...Wright then convinced William Goodell, Arthur Tappan, and a group of black citizens to bail Henry out and allow him to live with the Wright family."

In 1829, rioters drove a large proportion of the free black population out of Cincinnati. Those who left went to Canada and founded the town of Wilberforce.

July 1834 saw coordinated race riots in New York, with a mob attacking a meeting of free blacks to discuss abolition and spreading to sack stores, burn churches, and beat folks up. Various organizations blamed the abolitionists for provoking the violence. One white abolitionist bookseller, Isaac T. Hopper, was advised to take down his window display. "Hopper declared that he was not 'such a coward as to forsake my principles...at the bidding of a mob.' When a mob approached his shop intent upon ransacking it, Hopper walked out onto his steps and stared down the rioters, who then moved on without damaging his store."

The troubles with the national designation of themed time periods, like Black History Month and the International Year of the Woman, are many. Black history, women's studies, Latin-American culture, and so on are not separate things from the rest of life. We're all in this together. History and culture appear in most minds not as an integrated whole but as a series of high points, islands in a sea of normal, complexity cooked down to an easily-digestible simplicity that can be absorbed and forgotten. This is not useful, and for the most part theme periods work within this paradigm rather than upsetting it.

But one thing that is accomplished is, that librarians will pull out books like this one and put them on displays where patrons who aren't particularly looking to be enlightened have a chance to see it and be curious and get a taste of how the past relates to the present and how impoverished their public-school history curriculum was.

For my own part, interest in the complexity of history began with fiction, or with nonfiction packaged to appeal to fiction readers. I don't see enough historical fiction with black protagonists. When I do see it, it's normally based around the Civil War and slavery. These are of course interesting times; but other times, as the above indicates, were equally interesting. Because less familiar, I submit that the stories of Northern antebellum black people are even more interesting than those of slaves; or for that matter of Northern antebellum white people. Were you surprised to learn that Ohio had a sizable black population before the Southern Diaspora?

Yes, this stuff is hard to research. Yes, there's a profound discomfort inherent in examining how real people really behaved and spoke as opposed to how we want to arrange them into neat groups of folks we like and folks we don't like; and in seeing how little rhetoric has changed in America during its history. Yes, it can be hard to see your way clear to creating a protagonist with agency in social groups who have been systematically denied agency by the institutions of our democratic government. Those are all reasons to mine this nearly-untapped vein, not reasons to avoid it.

For an example of the possibilities, and the problems, of tackling such topics, I refer you to the remarkable, and remarkably uncomfortable, work The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, by M.T. Anderson. Totally worth the effort.

Idea Garage Sale: Stranded

This post is dedicated to Lupe, Peggy, JoEllen, Kay, Ben, Jeremy at Brake Check on S. Lamar, Jose at the St. Edwards University Information desk, and all the people behind me on the road when Moby wouldn't stop turning; without whom my Austin trek would have been way too exciting.

Because of all these people, my story is not a candidate for a novel; but as I waited in Brake Check for the last adjustments so I could finally drive home I reflected on how a novel that started with a car that won't stop turning could develop. The driver/protagonist would need to either be cut off from the friends and sympathetic, professional strangers I was able to rely on, or opposed to relying on them for some reason. Since the show on the TV in the lobby at the time was America's Most Wanted, the first thing that occurred to me was that the driver had a body in the trunk; but that's an antagonist, not a protagonist.

(Or maybe not. A nimble thriller writer could keep you guessing on this subject, depending on the backstory of the body.)

Let's make the driver a teen. One of my difficulties was that I had no cell phone. (I suspect we're going to break down and get one shortly.) All modern teens have cells, so why would this one be without? I could make it a historical story, but this by itself suggests no plot. What if the teen is a runaway and has ditched her cell because she knew it could be traced?

That opens possibilities. Why isn't she afraid of the car being traced? Maybe she is. Maybe the car is stolen, so instead of proceeding on the assumption that she needs to take it straight to the garage, she proceeds on the assumption that she needs to risk driving it a little bit longer, at least till she can steal one that works better.

What is she running from? Or, more pertinently, who? Is she being actively sought? Does she have enough criminal savvy to rely on stealing a new car, or enough mechanical skill to diagnose and jerryrig a fix for the problem on this one? What are her skills and resources? What's in the car with her? Did the previous owner leave behind anything that would surprise her or affect her choices?

Is anyone with her? Does she, who has no one to rely on, feel responsible for someone else?

Where is she going once she gets mobile again?

I'm too tired to answer all these questions right now. But if I could, I'd have me a plot.

Idea Garage Sale: What If?

It's getting cold here, off and on, and as usual we're hearing noises in the walls and attics. It's a 100-year-old house afflicted with late 20th-century remuddling on the cheap, and we haven't been able to fix it up, so it has its fair share of noises anyway. We're hearing fewer rodents in the walls this year but the noises in the attic are louder and more complex. Since we've seen the raccoon humping down the hackberry tree from the attic in the evening we know why this is so.

But what if we don't?

What if it's an alien? What if - ooh, there's a stranded alien up there and he's taken up with the raccoon in partnership? What if the raccoon is teaching him to hunt pigeon eggs and raid the compost heap and birdfeeders for food, and the alien is teaching him to use tools and help repair his starship (conveniently small enough to fit in our attic)? What is their relationship to our cats and the skunks under the shed?

Why exactly is he avoiding getting assistance from us (because we totally would help him)? Is it because of some overarching policy of the government he represents? Been there, done that. Is it because he doesn't recognize us as the dominant species and thinks the cats are in charge? That would make sense; the cats would then be the ones who limited him to the attic and shielded us from contact because, hmmm, I don't have a good reason right now. I'd have to think of one. Maybe his first interaction with cats is a negative one and he's hiding from them, too, but there's something he can use in our attic. Good lord, what do we have up there? Ooh, he needs our antique wiring, the paper-insulated stuff with the glass whatevers. (Electricians who look in our attic always go mad over the museum we have up there.) Maybe the raccoon is feeding him misinformation about other species for his own purposes...

Or maybe it's not an alien. Maybe it's something much, much weirder. Or funnier. Or scarier, depending on the kind of story you'd want to write.

What do you think could be up there?

Idea Garage Sale: Settings + TAS Field School, Day 2

Today we finished screening "the pile" and started actual digging. Cool finds to emerge from the pile: a glass marble and something the same size that might be round shot; the face of the pipe bowl from yesterday; a black bead; a portion of a china doll face (small, probably a 3" - 5" Frozen Charlotte or a penny doll); more buttons; and the star of the show, half a dozen carved wooden beads still strung on a brass wire, probably part of a rosary.

We have six units adjacent to the future BBQ pit. I stand in the pit and work on Unit 5. Unit 6 went down "to level" (10 cm below the surface) but Claire Younkin and I worked a little slower. This is typical and though it is possible to go too slow in a dig you should remind yourself, when you see someone else appearing to accomplish more, that it's not a race. A less-experienced digger who hasn't got the hang of trowel movement, a touch of arthritis, a site that is more complex or has more roots or is crumbling away and has to be supported - all kinds of things can slow you down. We aren't expecting much of the top level. Units 5 and 6 form the back of a former trash heap and abut the property line, from which a fence and a loose stone wall were removed to make room for us, so we found fence elements, baling wire, a plastic and a metal rod, screws, and some sort of machinery, a handle or a cog, that turned on a square axle and can probably be identified in the lab. And more glass. Lots of glass. The glass at this site, at least certain kinds, is going to be measured by weight, not per piece.

Screening the pile, we continued to find lots of bones, big and small - chicken and possibly other fowl, the broken ends of long bones of all sizes, ribs, and amorphous lumps of spongy inner bone with all the solid cortex eroded away. Early in the day, one of the people who wasn't at this site yesterday found a bone and asked about it. (To a first-day person, in any enterprise, the second-day person is an authority. This can be a heavy responsibility.) I explained about the smokehouse and said to dump it in the current field sack as it wasn't being curated separately. He said: "Even if it's a human bone?"

I answered: "If it's a human bone you yell out 'stop.' That's a game-changer."

He was joking, but the thing is, every episode of the TV show Bones begins with a similar scene - people going about their business and suddenly, shockingly, coming across a body in an unexpected context. A fresh body would transform the archeological dig into a crime scene; an in situ grave would change the entire nature of the dig; and an in situ grave of a certain vintage would become both a crime scene and an archeological dig.

It is a fact of literature that certain genres are as much about the setting and atmosphere as they are about plot and character. This is absolutely true of the mystery! This is not to say that the plot need not be clever or the character appealing, but do we not pick up a Jane Marple mystery desiring to visit St. Mary Mead and visit with her over knitting as much as desiring to have our brains tied in knots? Do we not choose to read about Sherrif Dan Rhodes for the appeal of his small Texas town and pawky humor, Phillip Marlowe to visit those mean streets, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to feel like insiders in the Checkerboard and the Big Rez?

A TAS field school would be a wonderful setting for a mystery. Every archeologist is a detective to a certain extent, and the relationships that develop at such annual events, plus the extensive supply of amateurs, professionals, students, children, teens, parents, locals, and landowners provide a dynamic cast of characters to fill roles as amateur detectives, snoopy sidekicks, comic relief, villains, suspects, victims, red herrings - anybody and anything you need. Once you decided to use the field school, you wouldn't even need a body. The mystery could be a disappearance, a series of theft, the identity of the looters cherry-picking the site overnight despite increasingly jacked-up security. You're spoilt for choice.

I often start a story like this, and the problem is to narrow the field. Before you can write the story, you have to decide which story you're going to tell. So ask yourself questions about what you want to do. What possibilities excite you most? To what audience do you wish to appeal? Do you want a short story or a novel, a series or a stand-alone? The answers to those questions will eliminate big swatches of possibility.

For instance, if you're writing a middle-grade mystery, the mystery absolutely must be solved by the protagonist child, so you need to choose a mystery that your audience will accept a child can solve. This is less restrictive than it sounds, because 11-year-old children are willing to believe an 11-year-old child can solve problems that an adult would consider it improper for one to even know about. If you're writing for adults and want to create a romantic crimefighting duo good for several books, maybe you'd have the new sherrif in town solving the mystery with one of the archeologists involved in the field school, striking sparks of sexual tension and sharing expertise.

Heck, this setting would probably be good for a romantic novel, though I never read those and wouldn't know. And archeological digs are such convenient launchpads for time travel stories that I've done it twice, myself. You could write a farce riffing off the social dynamic created by so many strangers, friends, and acquaintances camping together for a week with a common purpose. I'd kind of like to read a two-tiered historical novel/mystery in which the body is found and the mystery of who-this-person-is-and-how-did-he-die is worked on in the modern day and the story of the person the body belonged to is told in alternate chapters, each chapter illuminating the characters and events in the adjacent chapters. (Yeah, yeah, big bite to chew - remember, your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?)

Like some of these ideas but aren't comfortable with TAS field schools? What's comfortable to you? Scout camp and conventions and recreationist groups offer many similar possibilities - cf Mary Monica Pulver's SCA classic, Murder at the War. Not all members of the Society of Creative Anachronism routinely read mysteries; but I never met one that wouldn't read Murder at the War, because it enters into a world and a cast of characters that is personal to them. They want to see if they recognize anyone, if the author has treated the subculture fairly, to laugh at the in-jokes and check for accuracy.

Thousands of people attend field schools and volunteer digs like this every year. All of them are literate. I just thought I'd mention that.

Idea Garage Sale Interlude: Clio Wants You!

The theoretical person out there in the blogosphere who's been reading all these excessively long posts and anticipating the next one probably thinks she knows what's coming today, more or less, and is wondering which of the tempting side trails I ran across in Bandera I'm going to wander down today. The romantic history of Annie Schickenden and her shawl? The action/adventure/spiritual journey of Policarpo Rodriguez? The time portal in the old house that would overlook the Medina River if the trees weren't in the way? The possibility for a thrilling detective series centering on a small-town museum docent?

Okay, that last one is close.

Tossing ideas out onto the ether for anybody to pick up if they want to is fun, but I'm under no illusion that anyone will ever use them for anything more than a writing exercise, and I thought now would be a good time to take a moment and address underlying processes for the benefit of a particular segment of the writing community.

Unless participation was limited in some way, every writing conference, class, or group I've ever attended, in person or online, has included a few examples of the tentative amateur; the person who is still wondering where ideas come from, who has a sense of a creative urge without any clear idea of what to do with it, and who has at best a vague notion of what constitutes The Writing Life, but is usually sure that there is a standard Writing Life to which they might aspire. They usually assume that they're supposed to be writing novels and that publication is the big shiny goal at the end of the road. They might be very young and experimenting with their self-image, or retired and looking to cultivate neglected talents; either way, they haven't yet grasped the amount of work involved and are usually still looking for the secret formula or the set of rules that will get them what they want.

Some of these people will become perpetual wannabes or drift away to some other hobby because they are interested in the trappings, not in writing itself. Most of the rest will knuckle down and join the mainstream of the profession - award winners, mid-list authors, bestsellers, and a strong substratum of people who, despite all the hard work, talent, dedication, and business savvy anyone could ask of them, never quite get where they want to go. Some will remain lifelong hobby writers, content to evade the agony of the publication search and write poetry for their grandchildren; some will become editors or agents or publicists instead; some will find their niche and set up shop there happily; some will die still floundering.

Of these outcomes, only perpetual wannabeism and floundering are truly bad outcomes; though those among us who produce publishable work, shop the hell out of it, and still can't land a contract may feel that I dismiss the frustration of their situation too easily. (I don't; but am defining this not as an "outcome" but as "process" - a new day may be around the corner for any of us, and that's why we keep stuff in the mail.) So the idea up for sale today is not a story idea per se, but a lifestyle one; a suggestion for those who know they have potential but don't know what it is.

History has a muse. It is as much an art as poetry or fiction; it uses many of the same mental muscles; it requires similar writing skills and benefits from similar creative talents; its roads also lead to publication; and Clio, the muse of history, works and plays well all her sisters. Her raw material is everywhere. Though the academic discipline of history dominates its expression, it has plenty of room for the avocational amateur. J. Marvin Hunter did not work out of a university, but his work is essential for anyone researching his particular area of Texas - like me - and both the museum and the Frontier Times magazine he founded made history accessible to laypeople.

The fact is that many of the urges that lead people into experimenting with writing can be satisfied by working on local history - or on geneology - or on weekend archeology - or on nature study - or on any kind of public outreach. And you stand an excellent chance of doing tangible good in the world by putting some energy into these tasks. A family historian in Germany, Ilse Wurster, found letters from a Texas branch of her family, and the book on which she collaborated with Texas relatives, Die Kettner Briefe/Die Kettner Letters turns out to contain the answers to questions concerning what happened in Fredericksburg during 1864 that I had resigned myself to never getting. Similar gaps might be filled in the history of New York City if anybody ever transcribes that diary. Consider the role played by the geneologist in the drama of Susan Taylor Brown's discovery of her father's second family - a drama which would never have begun if Susan hadn't challenged herself to write poetry in public on her blog, by the way.

You may think there's no such drama lurking in your mundane little town, or that the history of your area is thoroughly understood and has no hidden crannies; but you'd be wrong. Somewhere within fifty miles of you is an untranscribed diary; is a record that will connect two disparate people or events in a network of narrative; is an old person with memories about to be lost to the ages for lack of someone to ask questions; is an artifact or a fossil or a building that needs you to discover its importance. If you don't see these things, it's because you're not looking.

Once you've uncovered a true-life story, you have a lot of options - far more than the authors of fiction. Local history is the quintessential niche market. Depending on the nature of your material, you may see your name attached to a brochure published in association with the local newspaper or to a book with a major house. Certain small presses specialize in local-interest publications, and self-publishing should not be dismissed out of hand. Die Kettner Briefe is a Lulu.com publication, but the San Antonio Central Library has a copy for the Texana room. As a commercial venture it's a mug's game; but money is not the only way to measure success.

Maybe you're positive that this isn't enough for you. Maybe you know in your heart that "novelist" is what you need to be, what you will be - as soon as you find the story that presently eludes you. That's fine. What are you doing to hunt that idea down? Where are you looking? And what are you doing with your liesure time that will encourage it to come find you? If you're not writing anyway, why not volunteer at the old folks' home and encourage them to tell their stories? Why not take on the project the head of the local historical society can't get time for? Where do you think all those historical novels out there come from?

"Not a historical novelist!" You protest. "I want to write fantasy blockbusters!" Then you should be reading them; and you should have noticed how ubiquitous and tiresome the generic medieval fantasy world is, how exciting it feels to pick up a book like Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, or Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife and see something that resembles an American historical backdrop. Maybe you've noticed how much the history and folklore of Britain have informed British fantasy. I'll tell you a secret - your neighborhood has history and folklore too!

Or maybe you want to write a modern detective series. Count up in your head the number of mysteries you've read that incorporated some specialized subculture into their background, and in particular into the character of their detective. Wouldn't an amateur historian or a geneologist make a great amateur sleuth? And how would you write convincingly about that subculture if you weren't a part of it? Isn't there a lot of potential for nitty-gritty crime novels in the sordid scandals of your city's past? What about that story you used to scare each other with in high school, the one about the unsolved murder in that dark and spooky house? Is there any truth to that?

Nobody's going to hand you The Perfect Idea. You'll have to dig for it and be ready to know it when you find it. You may as well do something useful while looking for it.

And if in the process you find that your vocation isn't for writing, but for something else - that's a win for you, too.

Idea Garage Sale: The Vampire with Iron Teeth

The normal course of casual noodling around among Fortean sources led me to this story earlier this week: Child Vampire Hunters Sparked Comic Crackdown. It's a feature from the British press, basically advertizing a BBC program about the 1954 incident, to be broadcast on March 30. I presume it'll get to American cable in a year or so.

The core attractive element for the juvenile/YA writer is this: Hundreds of children aged from four to 14, some of them armed with knives and sharpened sticks, were patrolling inside the historic graveyard.

Their target? A 7-foot tall vampire with iron teeth that had already eaten two children. The police broke up the mob, but so convinced were these kids, not only of the vampire's existence, but of their responsibility to bring him down, that many of them sneaked back out that night and the following one to resume patrol.

Personally, I think that shows a lot of spunk. Kids who'd behave like that are kids who'd make great protagonists. However, the parents in the neighborhood were, understandably, more concerned with the possibility of their children mistaking each other for vampires in the dark. As an author, I can see how you could make a thriller out of events either way: a supernatural battle to which the adults are stubbornly oblivious, or would-be heroes wrongheadedly charging off into tragedy on a tide of emotion unchecked by facts.

No children were in fact missing, and it's not clear what started the rumor, which brings us to the other interesting facet of the tale. Although the local boogyman was known as the Iron Man (it was an iron-industry area, and an ironworks overlooked the graveyard) and there are iron-toothed monsters in the Bible and in a poem taught in local schools (text not given, and a quick google gives me no good candidates), parent groups seized on the ever-popular idea of blaming the media.

EC horror comics were hard to get and therefore highly desirable in the area, and in 1953 Dark Mysteries #15 featured a story titled "The Vampire with Iron Teeth." So, it must be all the fault of comics nobody had ever read acting on passively impressionable youngsters as if by magic instead of (heaven forfend!) actively imaginative youngsters creating a social phenomenon on their own. To anyone interested in censorship, moral panic, and mob action, the symmetry of the parents' charging after the imaginary Evil Brainwashing Comic Book in response to their children's charging after an imaginary Evil Bloodsucking Vampire is almost too perfect.

Possibly, what this needs is a book-length non-fiction treatment for the middle-school market. In fact, absolutely, someone should do that! But there's at least two or three other novels lurking in there, too. I'd have to change the setting, presumably to modern Texas, but perhaps it would work best as a period piece. I live, after all, in the home of the Moral Panic, but nobody wants to hear that about themselves. It can be safer to displace such behavior in time, into the days of McCarthyism and lynching when everyone is acknowledged to have behaved badly, but We Know Better Now. (No, we don't.)

How the story plays out depends a lot on who your protagonist is, whether there are or are not any missing children, and whether or not you want to use supernatural elements. Is there a real monster? Is there a human murderer? Is there a ringleader in the mob, perhaps a campfire storyteller whose creation runs away with him? How much of the mirrored cases of mass hysteria are based in sincere but wrongheaded emotional reaction and how much is a matter of conscious manipulation of media? How in control of their own actions are the characters?

I'm much too deep in other projects to deal with this embarrassment of riches right now. Feel free to take it on for me, and I promise to read what you come up with. You won't do it the way I would, but that's fine.