I took a deep breath and gasped myself back to life, as I felt my sister sigh and pass away beside me. Sometimes we found each other lingering together long enough to touch hands and smile. Not this year. This year, I roared to life and I felt the strength of it, the hunger of it, in a way I hadn't for years. I felt like I could go to all the BBQs and eat six steaks and all the potato salad and maybe take one of the little kids running free as a desert. It would be that kind of summer. I'd sing with the jets rushing overhead and spread my arms wide with the snap of an American flag in the wind, and I'd visit hundreds of elderly people in their tiny hot apartments after the power blew out, because it was going to be that kind of summer. My kind of summer. I would come out of this one glutted on pinwheels and parades and BBQs and death. I could tell.


Inspiration: La Mort du Printemps: https://www.deviantart.com/art/La-Mort-du-Printemps-738504334
Story potential: High.
Notes: I like the idea of the seasons as vampiric sisters, who pretty much destroy all the things. This isn't a plot, though.

Wake me up when September ends, dear," she said, and then my mother rolled over and fell asleep amid a drift of comforters and overstuffed pillows. A single red-orange leaf lay beside her pillow, like an alarm clock promising to wake her up when her season came around again. As it happens, this had been one of the better summers that I could remember in my whole life, at least when one considers it a good thing when my mother is awake. After some fifteen years of being my mother, I think she's finally learned to remember that I am human, and mortal, and have limitations. I may be awake when she sleeps away the other three seasons, but once she wakes up, she's *up* until winter comes to town, and sometimes even for a bit after that, since the seasons may shift back and forth a little. There's wiggle room. Some of that wiggle room is why I saw so much of her this summer. I wonder how Summer is doing, honestly, or I would if I really knew him. But he's here now and again to visit with my mother and discuss those things pertaining to their separate domains (it's a lot more than weather, let's just put it like that). She got to be awake because of the drought and unseasonable cold that had some of the maple leaves turning colors early. Everyone else complained and worried, but it made me secretly and selfishly happy, because it meant that for once I got to go on a summer vacation with my mother and my father. Dad and I have always had our own little rituals--and believe me, I use that phrase in the most common and generic sense, not like some of the other mortals who've figured out about Mom and the other seasons would!


Inspiration: "Wake Me Up When September Ends" - Green Day
Story potential: High.
Notes: Not sure if I want the protag YA or not, but either way, lives with parents, interesting seasonal relationship. Stronger story potential because this could be a good seasonal sale.

"Snowshoe through fairytale woods," the brochure said. It sounded delightful. Fairytales are good, right? So my wife and I booked our vacation in the Icelandic resort, packed the kids off to the grandparents, and headed out the door with dreams of open, vast expanses of snow, toasty fires, and overstuffed feather comforters waiting for us at the end of the night. We never expected to be fighting for our lives--being *severely* out of fighting shape, no matter my weekly handball game and her daily jogging--and we didn't expect the rewards we got at the end of it either, and I'm not talking about the gold. Although the gold was nice, or will be nice, if we can ever get a pawnbroker to accept it.


Inspiration: A line in a NYT travel article: "Once a week, the trails are groomed to perfection, and the lodges’ caretakers will shuttle your belongings forward, leaving you free to cross-country ski or snowshoe through the fairy tale woods unencumbered."
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Mostly, I like the idea of these protagonists dealing with something like that. I suppose that makes me old.

It was important to leave the hut, to walk over snow that crunched under her reindeer-hide boots, to move among the herd, to breath air so cold it cut her lungs like a knife. It was important to squint at the winter sun and the dazzle of whiteness over the land. These things were all important, all necessary if she wished to remain connected and allowed in the land, if she wished to not have her hide hut blown over and the winter wind rush down to freeze her to death, if she wished not to have the ice crack beneath her feet and dump her into the death waters, if she wished to not have the reindeer leave and let her be alone and stranded and dying slowly in her hut. She just wished it was easier to make the wizard understand this.


Inspiration: Pondering what to do on my break from baby and house.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: There's some possibility here, but I haven't formed it/grasped it properly.

It just didn't feel like a holiday until the saints heads were hauled out and rested on their ceremonial spears. The ones with a little dried flesh still attached got dusted; the ones that were only bone got polished. Some extra padding was required to keep the skulls in place, of course, but a little of the green sponge kept for flower-arranging did the trick. One winter, her mother had used the green sponge to arrange flowers *in* the skulls, but that had generally been viewed as a lapse of good taste not to be repeated. One shouldn't mess with tradition. And so, just as the skulls were neatly arranged and the boughs of holly hung, the messengers were sent out in search of new saints. They hadn't found one in 10 years, of course, and the last one had been snatched up by the Gonnagles before their messenger even made it back to the hall.


Inspiration: Thinking of holiday decorations.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: This is an entertaining bit, but the story doesn't have legs (just skulls).

She tensed when she heard voices coming down the trail. He laughed. "What, you think they're coming here looking for you? You've been missing two months. Everybody's given up on finding you until Spring thaw. No, this is a school group that comes down every winter to study hibernation patterns. Buncha college kids. You--" he patted her thigh familiarly, "you aren't going anywhere. They'll find you when the snow thaws. What's left. In the meantime, you make good company and help keep cabin fever at bay." She slumped--


Inspiration: Voices in my head.
Story Potential: High? Medium-high?
Notes: I think it's my weakness for serial killers that's making me give this a higher ranking. And then...one of the students has some sort of psychic ability, precog, sensitive, or telepath. And how does that change the dynamic, and what are his limitations? Could be fun. Especially if it's all from the viewpoint of the girl in the box, so to speak. Or if it's her taking cues that might all be in her mind, leading to actions that let her escape. That could be fun.

Snow on the branches formed a pattern of interconnecting avenues that she stared through as though they were a forest of probabilities, and to her they were. The snow ate at her skin and she heard a howl of rage behind her, but she tilted her head to one side and saw the lattice of black branches against a white sky shift, slightly, enough that she knew where to step to go in. Her feet were numb but her step was sure, and she walked into the winter maze without hesitation. Another shout behind her, "No, Tanya, don't--!" Her father, come to the rescue too late. On time to save her from the others, too late to save her from herself. A wall of ice--

Inspiration: Leftover snippet of a Christmas card that I've been using as a bookmark, showing just branches of a snowy forest.
Story Potential: High?
Notes: I like the idea of a seasonal maze that does--something. I'm thinking like shaman selection or the like, but I don't know. But this almost isn't a story. But something about it pulls me...I blame it on being Minnesotan.

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?

Shifting the heating pads made different patches of her body warm, for a while. She tried to trick her mind into believing that it was the same as if she was warm all over, but she failed. As soon as she moved a heating pad, the empty spot chilled down. It took only a little bit before she started to lose feeling. She couldn't sleep; if she did, she knew she'd die. Instead, she spent delirious half-waking, half-sleeping hours shifting around the heating packs. Only the packs at her neck and her hands stayed the same--the arteries in the neck meant that that was the best place to spread warmth throughout the body, and, well, without the use of her hands she wouldn't be able to keep shifting the packs--

Inspiration: Maybe my own obsession with keeping warm is showing. Right now, I've got a cup of hot tea + heated slippers + a heat pad for my lap.
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Nothing wrong with this little sketch--in fact it's kinda interesting--but it alone does not a story make.

Dinner was delayed. She scowled out into the blizzard going on outside the cabin. He was due back by now. He knew she' d made his favorite--a main course of gingerbread cookies, followed by a nice hot oatmeal and cinnamon soup, with only the most delicate of spun-sugar spires for desert, and hot mulled wine on the side. She wasn't worried about him, for his element was snow--but his element was *also* hot warm cottages with snow blowing out past the windows and a nice warm fire inside. Especially because cookies were involved. She tilted her head. What was missing? The stockings were hung on the chimney with care, the children were tucked away snug in their beds--and his glass of milk was still in the fridge.

Inspiration: Oh, thinking of Christmassy things.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: There's no actual story here, but it's somewhat charming, and a seasonal theme gives anything a boost in potential.