The dreaded question, asked of every writer, by every aspirant, reporter, or curious bystander. I’ve told you before about my notepad on my phone. Now I’ll tell you about roughly an hour of my day today and what I got from that.
I’ve been listening to more of Catherynne M. Valente so if you see some luscious Fairyland prose interloping, well, you know where that came from. So that’s part of it. Today I also went to the pet store with the youngest to pick up new ID tags for the dogs. Watching ink or machines create something that wasn’t there before, like lines of text, sometimes feels magical. Or in the case of an engraving machine, technological, of course. What else could a machine accomplish? What would it take to make such a machine smaller, instead of half the size of a vending machine?
While we waited for the engraver to finish, I saw one of the employees measuring out crickets to package and sell. He had a rectangular tub with them swarmed across the bottom and literally poured them into a measuring tube that looked like a funnel with a long nozzle. You could see crickets crawling around inside it and the pour felt like a strange combination of pouring capsules but with the complication that some of them leaped out to the side. If they were actual capsules, what magic would react like that? What would it be like in a pharmacy or potion store for and by magicians and witches? What pours differently than you would expect? What hisses and jumps or steams or can only be poured upside-down?
Then we got in the car to pick up her sisters and she told me she had a magic asparagus that could turn me into animals (why yes, she does like watching Bluey, how did you guess?) and told me she would turn me into something. I said “as long as I can still drive” so she turned me into a small dragon, small enough to still drive. How would a dragon react?
I put on a voice and held the steering wheel higher with my elbows more up and told her I would collect hubcaps and steal license plates to make myself an armor of all the states and dangle myself with hood ornaments and rear-window jewelry. She told me not to eat someone to get their golden truck but that if I was a nice dragon she would give me a prize. I was nice, nice enough to get a golden truck of my own filled with slithery, clinking, dive-in-able coins. But once I had the prize, I didn’t see why I should keep being nice.
Her sisters got in and told me that autumn is the season of the Phoenix Blessing, when they fly by and turn the trees into colors of flame. It doesn’t work on evergreen trees though, and I told them that was because evergreens are trees of ice, with frozen hearts, that revel in the snow.
So that’s pretty much how it works for me. If I can write these down fast enough, they may end up in a story sometime. Setting bits, character pieces, things I can put on the pantry shelf until I decide whether they’re shaved up as flavor or whole meaty blocks of a developing story. Change, borrow, steal, expand- that’s how you get ideas.
Intellectual Property of Elizabeth Doman
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