Never trust the alien cook on a cruise ship. Especially not the StarLiner Luxury At A Discount!! line. Especially not if you've heard other guests grumbling about his rudeness and presumption--and he's a Roget. Because when a Roget is rude and presumptuous, it means he has great enough status to be so. There's a reason why Rogets have reputations as friendly, polite, deferential creatures. It's because most of the immigrants who come here to find work are quite low status. Of course, I didn't know any of this until after I got kidnapped. Okay, to be fair, I agreed that I would love to go on an "unparalleled baking adventure." I didn't realize I was going to get shanghaied off to an alien planet, to serve in an alien kitchen (no, not in a To Serve Man way--don't think I didn't worry about that on the way there, though!).


Inspiration: Some community post about a "baking adventure" - to which my thought was, now what would *really* be a baking adventure?
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Could be a good comedy series. Of course, being an alien chef has...extra...responsibilities. And the stories would have to include recipes. Oh yes, yes they would. And the recipes would have to be tasty, if you could find human equivalents to the ingredients. Think this would work as either novel or short story. I think it would work best told not entirely as slapstick, though. Deadpan humor, that's the key. Maybe.

The muezzin cried from the minaret on the day, the hour, the very minute that my mother died. And I was born, but that seemed incidental. I was, after all, only a girl child, perhaps of some use once I reached marriageable age, but not until then. My mother was the prized first wife of my father, and her loss left him inconsolable. The attentions of his second wife could not sway him from his grief; she'd been married for her family connections and wide childbearing hips, not from love. My mother had been his true love, though she'd been a gracious woman who made the second wife welcome and had not been the tyrant some first wives are. Or so Fatima told me, as she rocked me in her arms and fed me goat's milk from a bottle.

Inspiration: The opening of "Spitfire" by Prodigy.
Potential: High.
Notes: I say high potential because I like the setting. It would require more research into Islam to get the details right, though I've absorbed a fair amount from growing up in a Muslim country. Suffice it to say she'll be, ah, a "spitfire."

The interview was going smashingly, he was certain. He'd worn his best suit, had a fresh haircut and a hangdog smile that all his ex-girlfriends assured him was entirely charming. He did notice that the interviewer stopped taking notes partway through, but he hoped that was because his nature had won out over the demands of having to actually interview. Perhaps the job was his! He clung to this hope, mustering his energy and hope thorough the interview, the next of a long series of interviews, right up until he saw the interviewer quickly feed the notes--and his resume!--into the shredder when he turned around at the door to wish him goodbye. Needless to say, he was surprised to receive a messengered job offer the next morning. He blinked at the sealed envelope, still slightly hung over--

Inspiration: This photo - http://www.flickr.com/photos/riginik/2942524220/
Story Potential: High.
Notes: And then madcap mayhem ensued? It's not a new idea, but it could certainly be fun!

Your mission for this year is to worship Odin. He stared at the fortune cookie in his hand, his eyebrows raised. Well, that was a new one to him. Usually they just told him his lucky numbers, or said he'd meet a handsome stranger (that one had turned out to be his boss). They weren't prone to delivering marching orders. Of course, a long time ago he'd started following or searching out the ways that fortune cookies told him. It started when he was maybe 22, just out of college, and a fortune cookie had told him that the sky would empty over his head. He'd happened to lookup at just the right time to see a window-washer spill his bucket fifteen stories above. A quick sprint into the doorway of the building had kept his new interview suit from being ruined.

Inspiration: cvalenti talking about worshiping Odin, myself looking at a cleaning mission, and remembering gunn being unhappy with a fortune that gave her a direct order.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Neat. Super-neat. Nifty, maybe-a-novel-length good idea neat. My main concern with it is whether it would tread too close to territory owned by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaimon, and Tim Powers. Of course, I'm a firm believer that there are no "too old" ideas, just tired writers.

The address book was missing. He noticed that as soon as he stepped into the room, and his blood chilled. Nobody else would have thought that he had just lost his address book--there it was, sitting on the bed, plain as day. If the person looking had thought about it for a while, and had seen his apartment before, they might eventually have realized that the hand-knotted rug he kept under his desk was gone. It was only one with the knowledge of the knots and the stories that could be spun and tied into them that would realize the value of what he'd been keeping as a kick-rag. He hadn't done it just to protect the address book from discovery; it was a part of his part that he'd prefer not to think about. He sent his family plain, non-coded letters twice a year, and he moved often enough that if they sent a response, it would be--

Inspiration: Sitting with my address book on my lap.
Story Potential: High!
Notes: This could be quite good, I think. Not sure which influence will out in terms of the knotwork--seacraft, Persian, or something as yet uncreated? Could be fun.

Anybody who says "Virtue is its own reward" hasn't lived in our part of the world, and they don't know Virtue. Neither has anybody who thinks Virtue would be a pretty name for a girl. Virtue's kinda touchy about that, and since he's entirely capable of expressing his displeasure lethally, most people 'round here just stay away from the notion of naming girls after abstract qualities entirely. Boys, too, just to be safe. Word has it that Virtue's mother had born three boys and was dead-set determined on getting a girl next. So when Virtue happened to be born a boy, she did her best to turn him into a girl. She dressed him like a girl, called him 'she', insisted Virtue help with the cleaning and the cooking, and generally did her best to destroy any trace of manhood that the growing boy might have acquired. The only part of it that stuck is a lingering affection for the color pink.

Inspiration: That opening line and the idea that Virtue was a guy just popped into my head.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: It's a highly entertaining idea for a character, and that character might just be enough to carry a story. Could be pretty much any genre--western, sci-fi, adventure, etc.

I'm going down to Thimble Island, and as I look out the window of the helicopter an see the tall stone walls rising up on the circumference of the island, I wonder if I will be flying back out as easily as I am flying in. Not that that's particularly easy, actually. I won't be getting a flight down into the main city; I'll be parachuting out of the helicopter over the town square. That's the safe ground, they say. They've massacred enough people who dared to blemish the safety of the square that now anyone is safe if they can reach and stay inside the square. Even me, the one person who most of the island would like to kill. If they knew who I was, of course, and that's not going to happen. I hardly got a tattoo--

Inspiration: "Thimble Island" - Rasputina
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: ?

The snow fell down in soft drifts, swaddling the town, and the children ran to the windows to shout with glee, "It'll be a White Christmas!" their parents smiled and went about the usual business of trimming the tree, arranging the Christmas dinner, and making sure that the presents were all wrapped and ready to go when the lights went on again. The snow drifts didn't even cause concern the next day, when the snow was so high that many churches canceled their service. Everybody huddled around their radio to listen to services broadcast with many jokes about God listening to--

Inspiration: "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: And then the snow doesn't stop.

Today, I killed my first puppy. I cried buckets about it for the rest of the day, and you know I'd never lie about a thing like that. Not to you, my specialest and most precious friends. You all know I'd never lie to you about anything--not about what I had for lunch, not about how he looked when I finally let him see my panties, and not about killing my first puppy. It felt weird. They make you carry the puppy around with you everywhere you go for the first two weeks of classes, to ease the disorientation of leaving behind your families, they say. They aren't telling the truth. I figured that out pretty soon, but some of the other kids really believed it. They named their puppies, and played with them, and had puppy races--

Inspiration: Thinking about summing up my day in my other journal.
Story Potential: Omigod-high!
Notes: I'm torn. The novel/blog format is so 2001, plus hello! difficult revenue stream issues, but that's what this really calls for. It's a long serial novel...I'd want to play around with RSS etc. Also, I'm thinking a "special" college, not a high school--though presumably the youngerers would like reading that sort of thing.

The shrill whistle brought him out of his reverie. He straightened in his tree and scanned the plains that stretched out before him for a sign of the whistler. He saw nothing, and he frowned. It hadn't seemed that far away, and the grass was not that tall yet, but he saw nothing. He should have seen any intruder instantly; he had trained for a long six months before he was assigned sentry duty. He could spot a lizard crawling up a wall across the village. He could spot a hawk circling into the sun. He could see the ants coming for the corpse of a dead rat before they were even out of their anthill. He should have been able to see at least the disturbance of the grasses, but he saw nothing. He squinted. When an arm wrapped around--

Inspiration: teakettle
Story Potential: High potential. Wouldn't have said so until I wrote the notes, though.
Notes: Girl, cute, training in some sort of whistle/sound-techniques that can have really cool results. Maybe her distracting him means that he actually *does* miss some sort of intruder? Leading to them being banned and having to make their way in a strange world? Hmm.