Whenever I go out to speak and open the discussion for questions, someone always asks, "Where do you get your ideas?"
My answer is rather dull: "Ideas are everywhere, I get dozens of them every day. Great ideas are a little harder to come by."
Lately I've been having ideas pop into my head right and left--they tend to come in spurts. But most of these are unusable--or they're just not "me."
1. Antibiotics and roaches. I was thinking about toilets, and about sewers, and remembered a time when I peered into a sewer pipe and saw that it was SWARMING with roaches. Then I remembered that a lot of people flush their unneeded medications down the toilet. What if the roaches are eating the drugs? What if we are creating a swarm of mutant roaches? Gives a new meaning to the term "super bug," doesn't it?
I'll bequeath this idea to Stephen King. Then again, he's probably already done it.
2. Mosquitoes as weapons. I read an article on how the military is thinking about using mosquitoes as weapons. Seems that they could/can infect mosquitoes with viruses that are harmful to humans . . . and we could affect/infect an enemy with illness if we unleashed mosquitoes on them. After all, men have been using germ warfare for years--did you know that the English settlers of the colonies gave smallpox blankets to the Indians? Wiped out entire tribes. Shameful, but true.
Hmm. Interesting idea, but not for now.
3. The Baby Boomer Romance. I was reading an article about how a lot of baby boomers are working simply because they have kids in college. So I wondered . . . what if there was this really gnarly boss everyone hated? She/he is almost ready to retire, but he/she can't because his/her playboy son is still in college, stretching a four-year degree program into ten? So the office workers get together and charge Millie, who has a college-age daughter, with making sure her bookworm daughter sticks to Playboy Son and makes sure he finishes school. They offer some kind of great incentive so she'll stick with it--maybe they'll pay for her school. So Bookworm Daughter meets Playboy Son, sparks fly, and of course those opposites attract. Ta da! Romance . . . which I don't write. Tabling this idea, too.
Unless I get desperate.
Seriously, I spent most of the day thinking about a new idea . . . which is so far out there I'm going to keep it to myself for a while. :-)
~~Angie
4 comments:
wow! you do have some interesting thoughts! can't wait to hear your ideas for your next book!
Keep the little girl who made the snakes fall off in the name of Jesus on your list. I wrote a nice profile about that family for Focus but they cut that whole part because it can't be proved. But you can't prove that the neighbor ladies were going to throw the baby sister in the river when the mom died in child birth either, yet it was left in the profile. Guess people are more comfortable with that concept than that of a witch doctor!
I wrote a novel with "mosquitoes as weapons." Tarnished Image was published years ago by Waterbrook. Doing the research I learned that mosquitoes are considered the most dangerous creature on the planet.
AG
It must be fun living inside your head! Thanks for the morning chuckle!!! Clyde
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