The post of Writer for the Sleeping Child was a fairly prestigious one, and well-paid, and it wasn't as if anything bad was happening to the Child. The Child--slept. The Child would always sleep, until it was no longer a child. Then it would wake up and be taught all the things about the world that a non-sleeping child would have learned from the time it could open its eyes and look around. Except how to talk, and certain other aspects that were significantly distressing to most people who interacted with the former Child. He was pondering what he would do when the Child woke. He had not had it for its full life; there was a previous Writer who had decided to stay on for the next Child. He did not think he could do that. He knew too much of her sighs and the slight lisp with which she talked, he knew what many of the symbols meant and annotated them in the Writing as should be sent. Some Writers adopted the Child when it awoke, took it home with them and made it part of their family. If he had a family, he thought he would have done that, but he did not. He knew very little, really, about even normal children, and so he worried that he would not be able to take proper care of her. His family still lived out in the country, by the foothills, a journey of a week's length that he made only once a year, in time for the annual Moon Dreaming festival. He would not be able to rely on their support as another unprepared father might. And he could not move back, first because his entire life as far as he could remember living there was devoted to escaping, and partly because his only chance at making a good income to support a family was to stay in the city. He did want a family, he just wasn't particularly good at talking with women, and he knew none of the ways that a solitary man might acquire a family. If his sisters had lived nearby, he assumed he most likely would have been married for a good ten years already.


Inspiration: http://www.danielmerriam.com/index.php?option=com_ponygallery&Itemid=0&func=detail&id=150
Story potential: High.
Notes: She wakes up early, say at--oh--ten. And no, there is not nor ever will be anything romantic between them. Ew. But because she wakes up early, she retains more of the powers of the Dreaming Child than normal, at least when she sleeps. And then plot ensues.

"Due to the nature of the child's parents, it would seem to make only good sense that her custody is divided equally between the two parents, given what the medical professionals involved have explained regarding her...particular...needs. They assure me that with time it will become evident with which parent she should reside, but until that time, it is important to provide equal time, given various assurances of her safety regarding...manifestations of her nature...in either location." She sat there, trying to pretend that she didn't even know this family that the judge was talking about, but it was no good. On one side sat her earth-walking mother, wearing fancy high heels as fi to emphasize that she could, her skin tanned from the time she spent outdoors but her hair coiffed to such perfection that it made it clear most of that time was not spent in saltwater. On the other side sat her water-living dad, his hair a sun-bleached tangle that glinted now and then with a strand of pearls or precious metals tangled in it, his clothes the easily shed, waterproof kind, and a pitcher of water large enough for a meeting of twelve sitting in front of him--half-drunk. It would be seawater, too, she knew. She liked seawater well enough to drink, herself.


Inspiration: "Harbour Lecou" - Great Big Sea
Story potential: Medium
Notes: What happens when a merman and a human woman really, really don't love each other anymore.... I like the character of the daughter, though.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond, I wrote in the profile. What I was hoping to net was a smart girl with an affection for last-century ironic pop. What I netted was--well, you'll see. She's a girl with diamonds *in* her mind. How could she help being smart with an advantage like that? And sure, she's smarter than most of the smartest people I know. Took me a while to decide if I thought she was really smart or not, but I think she is. That sort of thing matters, you know, when you're thinking of asking a girl to marry you and start a family. It also means that the family jewels are going to get passed down to our kids, and that's--well, that's a bit harder to swallow. Not that swallowing is how they get implanted. Nope. It would be my wife, the black market brain surgeon. I ended up deciding that the connections, the leaps, the intuition, and the sense of how it all hangs together means that she genuinely *is* brilliant. The diamond network gives her perfect recall and the ability to execute any visualized or indexed action perfectly, but it doesn't help her sort out what to use or cue her to what's funny about the situation.


Inspiration: "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" - Cake
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Not original enough to be a good story on its own. Good title, though.

It's about the radiation, you see. It doesn't matter how much better for a kid it is to be with their mother--or their father--when it means going up into the solar radiation range. And when you get that drafted-to-work notice? Well, they don't have an exception for people who are the only parents of their children, not after the first six months. Like the kid would even remember you later if you left them after six months! So what you end up with is a bunch of people in space, and half of them are heartsick because they had to leave their kids behind. The ones who got deferred until the kid turned 6 months are the worst, because they had to leave their baby behind right when all the hormones and crazy brain chemistry and everything is fully kicked in to make them the best protectors ever. So is it any wonder that when wish-granting aliens showed up, our first sign of it was a passel of kids running through high-risk areas?


Inspiration: That icky story about the tanning mom.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Wish-granting aliens who aren't there to make contact but who keep granting wishes....

A lighted match could burn down the cabin he built. It wasn't much, but it was his, and he liked it flammable. His daughter came up to visit and she always exclaimed with horror about the location (in a designated wildfire zone!) and the construction (flammable!) and the lack of an emergency airvac port within twenty feet, like all houses were built with nowadays, and what would he do if some disaster happened? She might have not even let his grand-kids visit, except she was more sensible about such things than some of her preconceptions made her sound, and she always checked the fire zone hazard level before visiting, and he never invited them in the driest days of the summer. It was a nice compromise, and he liked it. He never explained about the basement vault--


Inspiration: Some song on Pandora that had that as the first line.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I at least like the setting. And then, natch, some disaster comes (while the family's visiting), and the cabin ends up being the best place to survive from.

She's with me until it sleeps again, curled inside my brain like when she was a little girl and would crawl into bed with me and press her cold feet against my legs until I yelped. Now she tries to keep her cold feet away, but I still yelp sometimes. That's the best I can describe it. How would you like having one of the soulless brides of the unnamed one shacking up with you? Just fine, if she was your sister. I have to wear sunglasses when she's there, and be careful not to let them slip, or her/my gaze could send my neighbor walking his dog spiraling straight into the abyss, and I really don't want a repeat of what happened with Fluffy. It's just not right to treat a dog that way, but that's the Nameless for you.


Inspiration: "Until It Sleeps" - Apocalyptica
Story Potential: High
Notes: I rather like the tone/subject matter contrast. Neither's particularly original, but together, I think it works. And I do okay with that horror/humor thing.

It was the twelfth day of Christmas, and signs of stress were beginning to show. "How much longer do you think she'll need this?" she asked between gritted teeth.

The psych nanny in her skull answered, "A large number of days longer, I would guess.. This is something she feels she lacked after her parents died, and it represents all the happy things that she wanted and couldn't have."

"And how long do you think it will actually be necessary?"

"All that time. Though at a certain point, she will probably start becoming angry with the toys and the perceived hollowness. What she really wants is her parents, and there's no bringing them back for Christmas."


Inspiration: Writing down the date -- 12/01/2009. Twelve.
Story Potential: High, mostly because of the Christmas angle.
Notes: Or is there? Time to think about technology and science and psychology. Hrm--the ghost of families past? Spiritual experience brain centers? (Nah.) Dead stars movie technology? A little Katherine Hepburn with her mother? A little Cary Grant with her father?

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"As soon as I turn 18, I'm taking out your plug!" she hissed at her mother. "No more of this! I don't *want* you knowing where I'm going, and I *really* don't like how you moms all got together and shared blueprints so you even know which *room* I'm in--and how could you let each other track your chips? It's totally no fair for you to know if I'm alone in a room with him!"

She glared at her mother from behind her glasses, for ince ignoring the chatstreams and the floating holograms of her friends videos with word-blurbs witing to be actiated. Her mother, in the real world and in the midle, was her unidvided focus.


Inspiration: The Writer's Block Prompt
Potential: Ah, low, I suppose.
Notes: Though I do find it entertaining to extrapolate how different interactions would change with technology. I mean, writers all over the place play with sex and death and entertainment. Less so fights with your mom or other unglamorous things.

Svetlana's second-to-last sister let out a scream that spiraled up into a peacock's cry, but Svetlana cowered under the firebird tree and covered her ears.


Inspiration: At a Minnspec meeting, I wrote this down for some unknown reason.
Potential: Medium, I guess.
Notes: My brain finds it to easy to go down well-worn quest paths for this idea. Avoid them.

Hell is the absence of God. That spark of light and hope and decency dies. Summer camp tries to survive. Mused by Phil. See full story notes in "Ideas-At Bat" file.