"Here's the thing." He squirmed. "You gotta be #flexible about the terms of delivery."

"We need agricultural equipment, delivered and functional in this colony's environment, before the first rain. It's very simple."

"You haven't met the Kblv."

"But it'll work?"

"Somehow."

Inspiration: flexible
Potential: High.
Notes: This could be a really weird/charming or SF horror set-up. The aliens do meet their trade obligations, but in very weird ways that can go all kinds of unexpected directions. But it will at least serve as agricultural equipment. I dunno. Seems like a fun set-up.

At first we believed it was just one of those golden harvest moons that everybody gets all excited about. Some people took blankets and went outside and had moonlit picnics in the park by the golden light of the moon, and that was lovely. I'm happy for them. But then they came, articulated puppets the size of a man or slightly taller, with impassive porcelain faces and painted lips and gold-mesh patterns imprinted on their cheeks. It was like a horror movie. I figure that they chose as their sample spot Venice during Carnivale, and so they saw all the celebration and the welcome of the puppets, so they decided to dress like that since it was easier than pretending to be human. Since then, I've seen them pretending to be human, and I tell you, the puppets were better. Uncanny valley land, man.


Inspiration: A combination of the moon phenomenon that just happened, and a Flickr pic from Carnivale.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: But man, this is some gorgeous photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesfarma/7133092599/ I'm a bit embarrassed that my story idea doesn't live up to it.

Dance, for the feeling is something that you can't keep inside! It may be the lying bugs in your brain jittering down along your spinal column and out along your nerve endings, it may be a dance that will make them call the police or the med isolates, but you can do nothing but dance! And you will understand when you feel it, for the dance is miraculous and wonderful and part of a world-dance that talks to space. You may only be one part, but when you really stretch and reach for that dance, you may achieve a state like the Sufis, where you rise above yourself and see the greater world. Did bees feel this way, when the bee colonies on your world survived? Yes. Who do you think their hive dances were for?

Inspiration: "Dance, Soterius Johnson, Dance" by Jonathan Coulton - and a discussion of different POVs.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: This POV immediately grabbed me, and I want to know what's going on, and--it has that strong, compelling feeling that good stories do sometimes.

It was the 28th. The date had snuck up on her so fast that her chrysalis was half-prepared, she still hadn't made arrangements for others to water her hope plants, and although work knew she'd be gone, she still had a stack of things she absolutely *had* to finish beforehand--not to mention training in the new girl who'd be filling in for her. None of those things mattered, though. It was the 28th, and so she put on her best red dress and walked over to the cocoon center. She felt the spinnerets under her dress swelling, preparing to spin herself a cocoon to rest in for the next year. She half-wished that she could postpone it, but on the other hand, she hadn't had a vacation in ever so long and she really deserved--


Inspiration: Check the date.
Story Potential: High. (Originally I thought low, but then I thought how well this would combine with something else.)
Notes: I like the spiderwomany character, but nothing's really changing here (ha!), though I suppose ridiculous amounts could happen in the year she's out. So--combined with another story idea, this could be good.

It was the sunshine hour for their shift, and so they trouped to the surface, their feet for once moving faster than the slow shuffle adopted after too much time underground, too much time where getting somewhere else meant nothing but more tedious work once there. They blinked their way into being able to see the light, and only slowly realized that something hovering above them blocked it. They squinted up like mole rats confronted with a fiery lion. Heat shimmered over its surface. A transport? Were more unfortunates joining them? Then the guards with the shock prods boiled out behind them, and--

Inspiration: Looking outside, where the sun is actually coming at a reasonable hour these days.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Meh. Boring, not really a unique story.

It wasn't until she found herself doing things ten years ahead of time that she noticed she had a problem. And then her assistant came rushing in with the figures for that projection, and she realized that she wasn't the only one. Then she flipped the TV to a news program and found them discussing what people should be doing to prepare for ten years in the future, and she realized that *everybody* had a problem. That was when she went from mild irritation at herself for wasting her time--to fear about why this was happening. She went outside, in the middle of spring, and found animals building dens for winter (she couldn't ask them, but she was sure that if she'd been able to, they'd have said it was for winter 10 years from now). She found mothers calmly buying clothes for children ten years older than their own. She found farmers looking really serious about how they were worried the giant granaries they'd been maintaining would hold up.

Inspiration: Thinking about preparing things ahead of time (dinner, actually--wondering about writing a book called "cooking for later" about slow-cooking and other prepare-ahead-of-time-type cooking).
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Not sure why everyone is preparing ahead of time, but it could be an interesting twist on any number of tropes.

Not being able to eat fish, she didn't mind so much, though she totally understood why the orbiting station had not one, not two, but 18 seafood restaurants (all very careful to explain that the fish was imported from worlds without sentient sea life). She did miss drinking alcohol, though, quite a bit. The explanation for why not was clear: it tainted the water they swam in, as if they'd doused themselves in a vat of vile perfume beforehand. Sure, she could drink and wait a week to go under, but that time period was pretty much only allowed on vacation. She knew some other underflyers did drink, bootleg whiskey tucked into their bunks at night, but she believed that it worsened their catch.

Inspiration: Discussing things I am and am not allowed to do.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Interesting world-building, no actual story.

They didn't realize what they had found, or what that relationship would do to us, on that first day. The signs were there, if they'd found it conceivable: we marched toward the closest civilization group to make contact, armed and ready for danger. We found it abandoned, as if they had vanished into the forest when they heard us coming. If it hadn't been for our body-heat sensors, we never would have found them. They didn't make a sound. When we rolled back the mat that the village had hidden under and they stared up at us with big eyes, at first we laughed a little and then tried to reassure them. Then we saw the dead babies. Their species was close enough that we could see what had happened. A couple of the greener recruits turned and vomited in the bushes. But--the aliens, they didn't act like there was anything wrong. Oh, sure, they grieved, yes; the mothers sat there holding their smothered babies with tears rolling down their faces.

Inspiration: Radiolab's podcast about the needs of the many vs. the few, and how humans only follow that about 50% of the time, and almost never follow it when the person is outside their immediate view. The examples being 1) smothering a baby so that it doesn't cry and give away the whole village to people that will kill everybody, and 2) jumping into a lake to save a drowning girl even though it will ruin a very expensive suit, but not being willing to give the money that could have bought that suit to an organization that will save a girl across the world.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: There's a lot of thinking involved in making this work out, though. Because there are a couple of really easy paths this story could go down that would be less interesting. Avoid 1) the "Giving Tree" scenario in which we destroy a native (alien) culture, 2) their goodness humbles us and we miraculously become a better society, and (probably) 3) it's a virus, we catch it, our civilization collapses. Also avoid the "Noble Savage" paradigm--make them equal to us in tech, etc. How would that evolve? So it's really about figuring out a way to fit their worldview into our worldview or vice versa in a way that will benefit all. Make us always see them as being the girl in the lake in front of us, or something like that. Exchange programs? Symbiosis (might be too close to 3)?

Also, dayumn am I coming up with good titles lately!

Lawyers break the law, doctors all smoke (and hospitals are the most dangerous place to catch something), and people were surprised when they found out that gardeners were actually doing what they claimed? We never said we weren't growing things. We always got the approval of the owners before we did our landscaping. Nurseries happily bought them (and we were so pleased when we realized the translation of "nursery"). I do find the "illegal alien gardeners" jokes in poor taste, but I suppose they were inevitable. And really, it's very important to me for you to understand that only a few of us--the bad apples, as your homily has it--chose to plant child-seeds that would kill you when they hatched.

Inspiration: Thinking about things that do the opposite of what they say, and ended up thinking of one that seems to do exactly what it says.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Huh. I like this. Something about aliens absorbing information/culture/languages as they grow in plant form, before becoming persons. I don't know if I want this to be just this--told first-person as an alien on a talk-show--or perhaps a longer story with this as a framing device.

His lactation was not proceeding apace, he noted with worry. It was possible, scientifically possible, but the baby had starved enough that it was having trouble sucking and without that--his shoulders shook with suppressed sobs. Manly sobs. He reassured himself that he was still 100% manly. When the kid grew up (he wouldn't let himself think if), he'd teach it to fight and hunt and swear and drink beer. If they ever escaped this hellhole. He didn't allow himself to think about the kid's mom. They didn't know if she was alive or not. He hoped that she was. He hoped that the freaking asshole aliens had just not realized--


Inspiration: Weird news story about a male Swedish college student who has begun pumping his breasts at 3-hour intervals to see if he can produce milk.
Potential: Low.
Notes: Weird news, yes. Interesting story, no. Though it's good to keep in mind in science fiction that there's no reason aliens would understand human family/nurturing structure instinctively. Or vice versa.