All around me are familiar faces. People can get all excited about reincarnation and the possibility of discovering that they were Cleopatra in a previous life all they want, but I say it's not worth it! For starters, there was only one Cleopatra. There were millions upon millions of slaves, or even people who just scratched a living out for the entirely of their lives. So finding out what you were is not so much fun. Who needs to be suddenly burdened with post-traumatic stress for a life that they never even lived? And then you get the less than one percent chance that you gain the ability to recognize people from past lives. That's me. The less than one-percenter. And it's awful. Everywhere I go, I see faces that I recognize from the twenty lives I've lived before. Yes, I said twenty. I know that's a lot more than the average, but apparently I'm one of the unenlightened ones, the ones who resist moving on. Or maybe I'm just one of the ones that goes insane whenever I'm given a good life and I do something so horrible that I'm cast back on down the reincarnation scale. Your choice which you believe, but I tell you, I think my life's pretty good right now--oh, don't think I don't see you inching away!


Inspiration: "Mad World"
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. It's a novelty gag, but not really enough to support a story on its own. Could be a decent minor character, I suppose.

Too many things to alibi, too many arguments and lies. He listened to the heavy pound of fists on the door. They'd be through in a minute, to find him here, squatting in the corner, his apartment papered with evidence. He lifted the blue pill up to the light and stared at it. It--he couldn't--who would take care of her? The door splintered away from the jamb. As the police spilled into the room with shouts and drawn guns and blinding flashlight beams, he dropped the blue pill into his mouth and dry-swallowed it, closing his eyes tightly. "Oh, shit--" he heard one of the cops swear...and then there wasn't a him there to hear it anymore. The--thing he was sitting on--floor, suggested a word in his mind, was cold, and there were noisy people in black rushing around.

Inspiration: "Sympathy" by Lou Hickey
Story Potential: High
Notes: And then it's a mystery. Once he is capable of being on his own, as a person with no memory. This could be...fun.

The stones gleamed a golden beauty beneath the rain from the downspout that polished the ordinary dull rocks to shining jewels. The water ran over her fingers, reflecting the sun that shone through the clouds. The storm light made the leaves bright green and the pebbles precious jewels, it made the air heavy and fragrant with promised fertility and possible death. The sunlight shone green, tornado-green, though the clouds were only light. Cars drove past on the street, heading home as soon as possible. On the edges of town, wind blew through the wheat fields.


Inspiration: "Zen In The Art of Writing." I don't think this approach to memory-mining works for me. Maybe I need to do the linked word-groups thing. Very odd, but seems like an approach worth attempting. So--ah, yes. I loved storm weather as a little girl, and my favorite thing was to be out in it, staring out how it transformed ordinary pebbles. Well, not strictly ordinary. My mother collected granite and quartz and other interesting-looking rocks, possibly as part of the same thing that made her interested in gravestones.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Maybe high potential? Storms transforming nature/beauty. There's something there. But I'm also looking harder for something because of the source. Hrm. I mean, really, there's something in anything.

It was the blank that worried her. It was a small thing at first, she thought, because she could remember remembering things surrounding it, but the blank grew, and that worried her more. She could, if she was clever, skirt around it by remembering herself remembering the blank, and she could write down the memories and hide them and find them later, but the original memory--was gone. IT was strange, remembering herself remembering a void. She developed all kinds of tricks to deal with it, and she had to use them faster and faster as the gap grew. Bad enough that the gap grew for herself, but she was sure it was a medical problem and that her doctor would be able to solve it, give her a medication or an operation or some cognitive therapy that would fix it all. She grew really scared only when she realized that others there had a gap, too.

Inspiration: Having a blank page to fill.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Don't we all fear forgetting? This could be strong. Some nice Steven King/John Wyndham-style of story.