Raunchy like a hurricane is maybe not the first thing that most people would think when they saw a woman wearing tropical clothing sitting in a chair in the middle of winter, but it's all a matter of perspective. Think of the sand, wear the clothes, imagine hurricanes or both weather and alcoholic varieties, and think of being on a beach. If you lie to your brain convincingly enough, you'll succeed in something. What you succeed in kind of depends on how you've been trained or where your talent is or simply which direction the luck is blowing on that day. Maybe you'll transform the back 40 into a tropical paradise (it's been known to happen--the person in question then went on to have a very, very successful tiki bar in the middle of Wisconsin until the weather wore off). Maybe you'll transport yourself to Fiji without having to pay the extortionate airline fee. Maybe you'll just discover that you can work your way into a state of mind where the weather doesn't affect you. That can be pretty darn useful in some occupations, like snowblower operator on the interstate. Maybe you'll summon up a bronzed cabana boy who wants nothing more than a vacation in a snowy cabin with a cuddly woman. It just depends. One person to try it that I know of got beaned by a flying manta ray. I know that it really depends, is all. On the other hand, it's usually less potentially harmful than some other kinds of magic that people try with a lot less hesitation. Love magic. Employment magic. Healing magic. All of those things have one heck of a lot more possible downsides, again, depending on all the things I mentioned above. It's not like you can open a book to a recipe for something, cast the spell, and get the something. It just doesn't work that way, contrary to all our initial expectations. Frustrates the scientists who try to get some "cross-discipline synergy" working to no end, I'll tell you that.


Inspiration: "Rock You Like a Hurricane" - Scorpions + http://www.flickr.com/photos/closetartist/8477937231/
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like the kind of screwed-up magic realism weirdness of this magical "system." Nice change from the more methodical and reliable kinds usually read about. Could be a whole hell of a lot of fun to write.

You'll hear talk about the biggest mistake men can make when buying a suit. "You didn't let the tailor get all up in your business." "You went with the cheap suit." "You got something too flashy for the occasion" "You got one with the pockets sewed shut." "You rented a suit instead of buying it." Well, I didn't make any of those mistakes, and I still ended up in witness protection because of it. Though I guess I did get a pretty nice suit out of it--free, too! The tailor sent it to me with an ominous note about his appreciating my good deed and how every man should have a nice suit for his funeral and he'd hate to be the cause of me not having one. Don't worry, they went through and scanned every inch of the thing to make sure there was no kind of bug or tracker in it. I was pretty sure there wasn't, plus it sure is the nicest suit I've ever owned, and so I was pretty stubborn about not giving it up. Leaving my girlfriend of four months who decided, when push came to shove, that this wasn't permanent enough to relocate for? Fine. Missing all my family reunions and not even contacting my mom except by sending a censored letter through approved channels? Actually a bonus. Losing my job? Didn't have one at the time, anyway--why do you think I was looking for a suit? I did need a suit, badly. And I got one of the most awesome suits of all time out of it. Funny thing is, I think it's brought me luck. Kinda like I've got my own--


Inspiration: Random Flickr photo of four men in suits -> Google "four men in suits" -> Men's Biggest Mistake Buying Suits
Story potential: Medium potential
Notes: Could be fun, I guess.

The drops fell from the sky like rain, and at first we did not know they were anything different. A few were swallowed by people and animals, and perhaps we should have noticed when they came back out looking much the way they had when they went in, in shape, if not in coloration. But they would have blended in, and besides, who studies their stool? We only noticed them over the course of the day because one and all they appeared to be little worlds encapsulating whatever lay behind them, much like a raindrop on a blade of grass may shrink the image of the flower behind it into a perfect, gorgeous world. We did notice when the raindrops didn't dissolve away or evaporate as the sun came out. And we sure noticed when we tried to move them and the image captured in them stayed the same. The image of a flower, preserved forever. Or a child. Or a woman holding an umbrella. A bus going by. A splash of water from the street about to drench a man. All of them. They appeared to be indestructible, too.


Inspiration: www.flickr.com/photos/collurania/8538382175/
Story potential: High.
Notes: Could go either the science fiction or the magic realism route with this. Maybe both, but that's a tricky balancing act to pull off. But I like this idea, and what they might show that would be good, or bad, and how they could be kept, and why, and who sent them, and why, and do they want to collect them again?

Piles of innocence, rearranged. The caption made him shudder before he even saw the photograph, though he wasn't quite sure why. Fear of serial killers? Fear of modern art? He rather thought that the latter was more terrifying to him on a personal level. And so--braced for dead babies or artistically arranged rubbish--it took him a while to understand what he was looking at in the photograph. First reaction: relief that there was no blood, no body parts, no death. Second reaction: confusion. Maybe it was art, but if so, it spoke to him in a way that modern art didn't usually. There were a few things that he remembered from his own childhood: a magnifying glass (perfect for frying ants with!), a pair of his mother's underwear (and how had they gotten those). Some things he didn't remember at all. Some things he vaguely remembered seeing one of the other kids playing with. But it was *his* childhood there, *his*!


Inspiration: Misreading and grouping together a couple of subject lines in my email inbox.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I think this could be a very good story, rather Bradburian, but I don't think it's so much my type of story. And it would be a lot of work to get it shaped right. There is also the grimdark in here, since innocent children are monsters, but there is shiny in the grimdark.

She was made of butterflies. They flitted through her mind, her ears were filled with the whisper of their wings, and she could never look at anything for long without seeing flickers of color at the corners of her vision. Butterfly wings. It started when she was only a little girl, when her uncle gave her a "hatch your own butterfly" kit. Then in grade school, all the little girl clothes were pink or purple or covered in butterflies. She always chose covered in butterflies. She sometimes felt she was a cocoon for something greater.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simplycasual/6911904671/
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I think...this belongs in horror. A peaceful, beautiful, evocative telling that when you strip it all out, becomes horror. Somebody's a cocoon, that's what. Or somebody thinks somebody's a cocoon. But it all ends in a flight of butterflies.

He said the dead would come back to us on Easter morning, and lots of people stocked their pantries and armed themselves for a zombie apocalypse, but it wasn't like that at all. Like I said, a lot of people prepared for a catastrophe. A lot of other people mocked the prophecy--or, like me, didn't even bother to mock it, just wrote it off as another crackpot spouting off in our increasingly religion-led state. So I was shocked when I came down to breakfast Easter morning and saw my mother sitting at our kitchen table, the same table she had sat at and paid bills in the evenings as I was growing up. She looked up and saw me, smiled, and just got up and walked out the door. By the time I ran to the door and threw it open, she was gone. I saw she'd organized my messy correspondence into neat stacks.


Inspiration: Thinking what holiday comes after Christmas. And the personal.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: I want more of a magic realism feel to this "dead coming back to life" idea. More of an influences and remembrances sort of thing. Not sure I can write this now, though. Too close--I might not be able to judge whether what I'm writing is any good or not.

The chapel bell tolled from the adobe church, sending reverberations echoing across the almost-ghost town. Tumbleweeds would have found another street to roll down. But in the zigzag of dusty streets and mangy dogs and falling-down mud-brick houses, one house stood tall and proud. A garden of extravagant red and white roses bloomed in its front yard. And inside it, there were two sisters, twins fraternal though not identical, who were preparing for their quinceanero. One was called Rosa Roja and one was called Nieve Blanca, after a snow globe her mother had brought back with her from New York when La Migra caught her and sent her home. She was pregnant then, and sad because the twins' father had not been willing to marry her, not for the children and not to save her from deportation and most certainly not for love.

Inspiration: "Schism" by Tool
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I like the idea of somehow tying together migration and illegal immigrants and snow white/rose red and the archetypal spaghetti western sort of small Mexican town. It would be magic realism, surreal, deliberately archaic. With coyotes and a cop. Title? "The Borders of Rosa Roja and Nieve Blanca" or something.

He felt her in every seed she might have sown, in every tree she might have grown. He felt her in every beat of his heart and every pulse of his blood, the part that she would have fixed. He felt her absence so sharply. She lay in her coffin deep in the clay dirt, under a roll of green plastic grass that failed to conceal the raw ugliness of a grave dug into the hill. The flowers he had planted on her grave lived, still, but she was gone forever. He felt the flutter in his heart, the flutter that she'd planned on fixing in an operation scheduled for a month, and he did not care. He saw the seeds sitting in the garage--

Inspiration: "I Feel You" by Schiller
Story Potential: High
Notes: Sort of a magic realism story about healing--things fix themselves through mysterious circumstances, which sort of comforts him, until one day he finds his heart flutter gone (metaphor for grief and stuff). Or could take it entirely in another direction and make it SF, with creations guided past the hand of the one who gave them agency. Ooo. Writing it both ways, to sort of contrast, could be interesting--but could they be packaged as one story? Maybe not. Maybe would have to write and sell them separately--or would you? Could frame it as a grandfather and a grandson's similar stories.... Congenital heart defect? Hrm. Pondering.

The jungle loved her, and she loved it. It fed her, it soothed her to sleep with the patter of rain on the leaves, it washed away her tears, and it comforted her at night. Boas wrapped their coils around her gently, and large cats brushed up against her legs when she began to forget what it was to be touched. She walked without fear in the jungle. There were other people in the jungle, but it did not love them like it did her. It did not speak to them, or protect them. To them, it was casually hostile--not intentionally, but just because that was the way it was when it was not there. When it was only the parts of a jungle, it was vicious; rain drowned them--

Inspiration: "Rain" by Corciolli
Story Potential: Um, low.
Notes: Way too many ways for this to go to the bad.

This is a placeholder for my dream/story idea: http://cloudscudding.livejournal.com/709264.html