Inspiration #15

Dr. Laurel set up his equipment in the corner of the padded isolation cell.  They moved M. to the padded cell because they were not sure how he would react to the playback of his professional recordings, made before his psychotic break.  Early in his confinement, they had him in a padded cell for his own safety, but after some additional, unclear psychic trauma, M. has been placid.

The doctor was well aware the "M.", as he was now known in their notes, had been a renowned psychiatrist before his illness.  Dr. Laurel was deeply invested in M.'s case, not only because it was a mystery, but because he had written several papers based on M.'s extraordinary work.

Inspired by the final short story in the slipstream fiction collection, "You Have Never Been Here" by M. Rickert.  "You are on the train, considering the tips of your clean fingers against the dirty glass through which you watch the small shapes of bodies, the silhouettes on the street, hurrying past in long coats, clutching briefcases, or there, that one in jeans and a sweater, hunched shoulders beneath a backpack."

"You Have Never Been Here" will disturb your perceptions, which I think is the basic premise of slipstream fiction.  I read and reread the ending paragraph because it's so fascinating.  Overall, a cool collection of stories that are not quite science fiction nor are they quite "regular" fiction.  Worth a try if you like 'em weird!

Inspiration #14

Every blackout was the worst blackout.  This time, Bill woke while still awake and moving, which was much more disorienting than waking while having been asleep.  It was like he was a passenger in an unwieldy and unlikely ship, listing to port then to starboard, lurching over waves and landing in the troughs, only luck keeping it from capsizing.


From the second to last short story in Feeling Very Strange called "The Lions Are Asleep This Night" by Howard Waldrop: "The white man was drunk again."

Inspiration #13

It wasn't lucky to have a rose with thirteen petals, and no one would buy a rose that had them.  Nor would the thoughtful superstitious buy a rose with more than thirteen petals because, they argued, the petals on the outside could wither and fall off leaving thirteen petals.  Bad luck.

Because of this superstition, Simon spent mornings plucking petals off of roses.


Inspired by the first line of Theodora Goss' "The Rose in Twelve Petals" (which is a fascinating take on Sleeping Beauty.)  The opening line:

I. The Witch
This rose has twelve petals.

Inspiration #12

One of the most heart-wrenching situations is to be a person with a dream and the drive to be a clown, with absolutely no talent.  Not even the talent to be a talentless clown, who can elicit laughter through bumbling.  Only the kind of clown who is confused for a homeless person, who elicits only pity, and who frightens the very young.


First line inspiration from "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon: "Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour."

Inspiration #11

At first, the government didn't acknowledge the protests, but when women began meeting in larger and larger numbers, they began scoffing.  Scoffing is always first.  Second comes delegitimization, which burned out after the effects of the larger numbers of women protesting were impossible to ignore.  When delegitimization no longer worked, undermining was increased.  Undermining involves spreading of rumors; in this case, that the women weren't protesting on their own, but rather that they were being supported by members of the opposition party, foreign governments, terrorists, or even aliens.  However the protests had grown too large for undermining to work.  The government hadn't counted on the protests lasting so long or engaging so many.  They had no step after undermining, but they did have a leap: bombing.

First line inspiration from "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum" by, indeed, Benjamin Rosenbaum: "On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself 'the World's Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly') aboard the P.R.G.B. Sri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know."  A neat story on the surface with a deep layer underneath.

Inspiration #10

On the first day.  Usually a "Humph" or "Hmm" or even a "Ha" followed by a quick up-snap of the head and scan of the faces in the room, searching for one with dark, hollow eyes, dramatically punctuated with thick slashes of eyebrow above and a thin, sad smile about to form the word, "Here."  

Inspired by the first line from "Bright Morning" by Jeffrey Ford: "If there is one thing that distinguishes my books from others it is the fact that in the review blurbs that fill the back cover and the page that precedes the title page inside, the name of 'Kafka' appears no less than eight times."

Inspiration #9

My grandmother remembers when they still had deliveries by people, right to where you lived, and it was provided by a nationwide system.  Every person agreed to pay what they could once a year in exchange for big projects and services like that, which they could never make work on their own.  Incredible.

Inspired by first line of "Lieserl" by Karen Joy Fowler: "Einstein received the first letter in the afternoon post."