When arriving in a new town, I always go to the churches and listen for the differences in their #dogma first thing. They've got a stake in keeping their congregations alive, you see, unlike town shareholders. A parable about Grnphs saved my life in Ringtown, recently.

Inspiration: dogma
Potential: low
Notes: Eh, not very interesting to me. I do think that churches would be a good way to get the lay of the town, but I'm not all that interested in this character or Weird West situation... Or it could be SF and planetary colonies, I guess.

Stocking up and packing baby stuff is a lot less easy when you know that you'll be out on a colony that has literally *nothing* that isn't requisitioned in advance. There won't be a baby store you can run to to find something you forgot about, and there won't be a delivery network that can get you whatever you think is necessary within 24 hours of you discovering that you need it. My mother tried to reassure me by telling me that hundreds of years ago pioneer women were in the same situation, and most of their babies survived just fine! For starters, shes not a historian (I am), and so she doesn't realize exactly how awful the survival rates for infants back in the day really were. Fortunately, most of that was for medical reasons, and one thing that we are guaranteed is an absolutely top notch medical team, an expert vaccine formulation, in-home health AIs analyzing and monitoring every little breath and heart murmur. In a lot of ways, our health will be better looked after there than it is here. I mean, how many private citizens an afford a doctor on call and 24/7 monitoring? Not many, that's how many. And I know I'll have enough nappies and bottles and blankets. I'm just worried about the things I'm not thinking of. I even begged my sister-in-law to let me just stay in her house for a week and help out with her one-year-old. She didn't refuse, funnily enough! And I did get a few more ideas, but it's not the same as what I might need for a newborn or a six-month-old. I'm just going through all the lists and asking every mother I meet. My husband initially joked that I was going to fill up our shipping allowance with baby stuff. I think he means it less as a joke now, although the amount we were given seemed princely and impossibly large when it first came up.


Inspiration: An email with a subject line about packing for baby.
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Though I do like the idea of including a pregnant woman the next time I write a colonization/space story. Extra needs, different priorities.

She sank down into the blue-green waters and thought, "This is worth it. Being able to live here, being able to do this whenever I want, it is worth all the inconvenience and the trouble and the stress of the job." She hadn't swum this particular coral reef before, but it was far off from the major visiting areas and so she had some hope that it would hold some of the more shy and hard-to-observe species. After all, she told herself, there was nothing wrong with having a hobby, and hers was stilling underwater species in their natural environment. She'd managed to sell a few of her stills off-world for a sum large enough to buy out one year from her contract. Still twenty-six years left, but that wasn't so bad. Lots of people did worse. She was careful never to buy from the company store any of the luxuries that could have easily added even more time to her sentence--contract, she correct herself. She would probably have to bite the bullet, so to speak, in about twenty years when it was rejuv or head for the threshold beyond which you were nonrenewable. She didn't like the idea, but it didn't come standard as part of the contract, and it wasn't the sort of thing that--


Inspiration: Google "carved box skin" -> image of two angel skin coral carved Asian women.
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Could be a story, doesn't demand to be. Oh, and I'm pretty sure she finds carvings underwater, grown over or whatever.

She was going to die because of the weather. She sat in the lounge, looking out the window at the aquamarine blue snowflakes sliding down the bubble. The weather meant no flights. No escape. No chance. They would track her soon enough to the town, and why would a refugee run to a transit town so small it only had two bars and no church? A one-horse town, it would have been called in the state she grew up in. The only reason was the small port. It wasn't a regular human transit port, just a general workhorse of a shipping depot, hauling things in from offworld and shipping intraworld and transshipping those few luxuries expensive enough to make it worthwhile. That's why she'd chosen it. It hadn't seemed like it would be their first choice of a place to hunt for a girl looking for a flight off-planet. It wasn't even listed in most directories, simply because usually human cargo wasn't taken on. It could be, though.


Inspiration: A snowy day, my husband refusing to go anywhere.
Story potential: High.
Notes: So she doesn't go anywhere. She stays right there--somehow. Gains an invisible job? Hides out among the machines? Something. And then plot ensues.

The sheep are friendly, open-faced, and inquisitive. They still have the rudimentary hands that they were given to allow them to crew during the voyage. The mutagen rate had dropped a lot more than expected, but they had formed their own odd society by the time the humans woke up from their long sleep in rad-hardened coffins frozen down to below zero. The sheep performed the duties assigned them and were rewarded by the ship pellets. The most interesting thing was that a fault in the computer killed one of the crucial reward circuits only 10 travel years from the final colony--and the sheep kept performing the task. Without them, the entire colony would have flown straight into the sun. So it is sickening that the reason they are kept now is because they are good for meat. Even though we are on starvation rations as we get the colony up and running, a good quarter of the colonists have voluntarily become--not vegetarian, but non-sheep-eaters.


Inspiration: Cake's "Sheep Go to Heaven" -> Googled "sheep" ->
Suffolk (sheep) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_(sheep)
Jump to: navigation, search. A 7-month-old Suffolk ram. Suffolk sheep are a black-faced, open-faced breed of domestic sheep raised primarily for meat. Contents ...
Story potential: High.
Notes: Hmm. The challenge here would be dancing around the various cliches.

Whipspring is an amazing wood, and demand for it far outstrips supply. We have tried sending it elsewhere to grow, you see, but it never spreads. What we've planted stays, and that is it. The gentle lemurites live in the whipspring stands, and we've signed a pact that they will always have adequate habitat for their numbers. The range and breeding rate means that there is very, very little whipspring that can be spared. It does usually grow back the next season, but then a new tribe of lemurites moves in, too, making it not fair game for our woodcutters. Only a handful of people grumble about this on-world. We charge ridiculous sums of money for what we do harvest--and get it--and gullible tourists are happy to shell out large cash for "genuine" whipspring wood mementos. The real stuff is only sold through the official trade stand, certified and numbered, but offworlders assume that nobody could live with a resource restriction like that. They think that there must be bribes and exceptions.


Inspiration: "bamboo" -> "bamboo lemurs"
Story Potential: Medium-high
Notes: Y'know, ecology done right. Kinda want to show people actually preserving the full extent of a habitat by choice, and it working out reallyreally well for them, even if they don't understand the role of the lemur(ite) in the spread of the valuable tree just yet, or whether the lemurites are sentient or maybe the trees are...something is.

Goal 1: Getting the hell off this rock. She leaned back and stared at it, written out in pencil on her tablet. Easier said than done. She wasn't indentured, thanks to being 3rd-gen, but her parents were. She'd been educated to the rudiments required by law, but no corp would pay for more education for a non-indy who might get up and leave whenever she felt like it. She had indy friends. They lived better than she did. Still, she wasn't going to indy herself just to get a better job and a more nicely decorated cage. She lived in the poor section of the station, along with a lot of other 3rd-gens like her. They were poor because they couldn't get a decent job, not because they weren't smart or law-abiding, so it wasn't that bad. They helped each other out. But still--she had to get out of here.


Inspiration: Read a snippet of an article about setting concrete goals.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: I like the idea of how an indentured society might cause problems for the non-indys. Though alas, I want to use the term for its irony, but I think it would cause too much cognitive dissonance for the reader.

There was no up or down in the water reservoir. There was no out and no in. There was no right and no wrong. There was no company. Even on an EVA, there was such a hive of ships and workers on the skin of the station that it was impossible to truly feel alone unless you let yourself drift out far enough to be at risk of becoming a Flying Dutchman. In here, though, she could be herself, hair flowing out in the water as she rolled over and over. Eventually, she would touch the floor, or find her head breaking the surface. It was not in her control when. She might swim for only a couple of minutes, or for hours, until the webs between her fingers ached and her gill flaps felt rough and raw from the chemicals the water was treated with. It was safe to swim in--she'd asked, carefully--so long as you could breathe water.

Inspiration: "Any Other Name" by Thomas Newman
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Good character, interesting setting.

The baby birds popped their heads out of the olympo tree to watch the parade of beasts go by, sad that they were too young to join in. Their mama and papa both joined the winding parade as it trumpeted and sang and stomped its way through the forest. They never came back. After it was dark again and they should be sleeping, the baby birds could not, because they were so hungry they felt that if they slept, they might die. And they would have. They chirped and peeped and complained even though it was the quiet time, when they should be sleeping. But they were hungry and did not want to die. Eventually a shadow came along and stopped in front of the olympo tree. "Oh," the voice said.

Inspiration: Seeing something poke its head out of the bole in the neighbor-across-the-alley's tree.
Story Potential: High? Medium?
Notes: Writing from this perspective's weird, but maybe the way this should be written? And who or what piped away all the animals? To what fate? Is this an environmentalism parable? I just don't know.

His face was black as the night on a stormy sea, and his eyes were the shining moons that sent sailors back safely. His voice held echoes of sirens' calls, and his hair was dreaded with tangles of seaweed ad shells. His skin was dry, and his feet were cracked as if he'd walked across the desert to reach them, despite them being in the middle of the sea. "Go back," he told them, standing on their deck, not swaying with the motion of the ship but somehow making the ship still around him. "Go back. I am the first guard, and these are people you should not visit." They didn't listen, though they crossed themselves without shame--he was not a Nubian, as they'd thought from a distance--no human had skin that black.

Inspiration: "Under African Skies" by Paul Simon.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Just doesn't speak to me.