In what we eventually decided to call The Case of the Hollow Client, we didn't realize she was hollow at first when we took the case. Granted, I think that innate sexism that I've tried so hard to banish from my own thoughts reared its ugly purple head when she walked into the room and said, "I don't care if she seems funny or off-kilter or a little bit not-there, take a look at that body! Especially that bit. Those, too. And did you see the--oh, crap, she's looking at us." And so I was too busy trying to cover my own reaction, since one never wants to be quite the sexist pig that one's ex-wife told one one is, and I never noticed that she didn’t have the reaction to my reaction that a normal reactionary person would have. If you follow my drift. So I have only myself to blame for some of the weirdness and the sadness that we ended up in later. Of course, I also only have myself to blame for the parts of the thing that were incomparably grand and worth every penny that she'd promised to pay me and didn't.


Inspiration: Sherlock, "The Sign of the Three" - so don't use that case name!
Story potential: High.
Notes: I rather like the idea of an extremely self-aware protagonist who is, in fact, very sexist in his first impulses and very good at not actually acting that way. Most of the time. Could do the same gig with something else, I guess, but it might be a bit much to make him sexist AND racist AND etc.

It was never a good sign when her third husband came home and wound himself around her legs and then hid under her desk, where she could protect him. There had been quite a bit of that in the beginning, when she brought him home, as there usually was between new husband and old husbands. The marriage broker had told her to make a space that would just be the new husband's, and to let him venture out of it when he felt comfortable doing so, and not to freak out when the husbands fought. Of course, she already had two, so she had seen some of how it worked, but the first two had settled relatively quickly. Husband three...had not. He didn't start fights or mark territory, none of the usual ways that husbands caused trouble. No. He would--

Inspiration: Oh, a cat ran under my legs to hide from the Roomba.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: But it's tricky. The gender politics of this could be--troublesome. Would I feel okay if this was about a male and his "wives"? Less so, I judge. Ah, double standard. Perhaps a less charged term than husband and a more gender ambiguous one? Or would that be copping out? Hrm. Pondering. In fact--what happens if a husband gains independence? Would he then get "wives" like that? How would this society react to that?

It was a question of gender, really. She wasn't sure what she wanted, but she knew it wasn't standard-she, as she'd been born, though of course nobody called kids he or she; that would be rude, and limiting. She thought she might be a she-gear, one of the creatures of grease and iron and muscle that still had a disconcertingly earthy mind and a knack for luring in he-suits that didn't know what they were getting into, or liked pretending they didn't. She wasn't sure, though. Her mother was a house-she, a woman content with childrearing and home decor and gardening, though she'd gone through a phase of being he-femme before he met her father and became a house-she.

Inspiration: That discussion Phil and I had about necessary thought-about parts of science fiction framing.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: The other key part is that this can't be the story. It *has* to be the background, where the story takes place in this. I find the notion of gender speciation interesting.

The twist on the tale, as he always liked to say, came at the beginning, when nobody would have expected it. After that, it all seemed to settle out into the normal run of affairs, with a poor helpless princess and a fine knight charging to her rescue. The twist, though, as twists are wont to do, came around again at the end, when the knight discovered that his princess was, though very princessly, not as female in certain key areas as he'd been hoping for. It was a case, he found, of the seventh son being gender-switched at birth to avoid certain prophecies about seventh sons of a seventh son. It happened fairly regularly in this particular family, as they had always had the double curse of, well, The Curse, as well as being as prolific as rabbits let run wild in a farmer's field. The fair maiden blushed and fainted when she allowed the knight to slide his hand up her skirts, just a bit, just far enough for him to see what sort of prize he'd won--it was tradition, after all, and they were to be married--she'd been rescued fair and square after the dragon--

Inspiration: Thinking about the twist in a story I'd just been listening to.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: At first I thought this didn't really have much in the way of potential, but then I became intrigued by the notion of the way that a person born male but raised female would feel once it was revealed, esp. in such a very traditional setting...a curse provides a good fairytale reason for this, but I wouldn't really tell it as a fairytale, I don't think...or maybe I would....