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I suspect that the perennial question for authors, "Where do you get your ideas?" has moved from being an eye-rolling chore to being a challenge to have the cleverest answer ready on the tip of your tongue. (Always, of course, being careful not to make the questioner think you're mocking them. After all, these are the people you want to be buying your books.) But it can be hard to convey to someone who even needs to ask the question just how many story ideas are clamoring at the gates of one's attention if one only looks around.
Yesterday, I was searching in the Controlled Document database at work, trying to remember the right keywords to find the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for handling in-process material that is restricted due to an on-going investigation. At one point, I gave up and did a sledge-hammer level search, which meant visually reviewing five pages of document titles belonging to the most likely correct department. And that's how I stumbled across the fact that my workplace has an SOP entitled "Operation of Unicorn Control Systems".
Unicorn Control Systems.
My first thought was that I had either misread "Uniform", or that it was a typo (these things happen). The reality is much less interesting. [1] But for just one moment there, a story opened up where a mild-mannered biotech pharmaceutical company had a secret identity involving management of supernatural creatures. And ordinarily all evidence of this activity would be hidden behind firewalls and passwords, but due to a fleeting security glitch and an unexpected keyword search, a tantalizing clue pops up…
That story could go a lot of places. I'm not likely to take it to any of them. But when people ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" the answer is usually, "You're soaking in them."
I've always had a fascination for the stories where a chance encounter reveals the fantasy living side-by-side with everyday life. When I was a kid, I guess it was my favorite escapism (well, second favorite, after the one where the aliens from another dimension contacted me to take me home). You turn the corner and there's a little door, just six inches high, hidden behind the wall hanging, and just as you spot it, someone on the other side pulls it firmly shut. You sit beside the forest pond, staring into the dark waters, and then you notice that some…thing is staring back up at you. You climb up into the attic on a rainy winter afternoon and pry open the old trunk that has been sitting there since your grandmother was a girl, and inside it you find…
My childhood was largely devoid of locations that held that kind of potential. I grew up in a suburb of San Diego that was so brand new that we'd picked the empty lot and the house model and watched them build it. That makes it hard to imagine hidden mysteries. (I did leave a mystery for the future. Hidden inside a wall that was part of some remodeling we did when I was a teenager is a folded piece of paper with a long message written in my first con-lang. I'll never know if anyone ever finds it and wonders, but I like to imagine it happening.) There were a few places with potential in the enormous old house my grandparents lived in in Portland. But as I recall, I first started actively looking for those intersections with other worlds when I was ten years old and we were living in Prague.
It wasn't that the apartment house we lived in was full of mysterious nooks and corners -- no, it was a standard Soviet Brutalist apartment block, mysterious only for how one could fit a family of six into a two-bedroom unit without bloodshed. But that year I discovered a number of authors who relied on those sideways doors into fantasy -- I especially remember the Borrowers series by Mary Norton -- and I was of the right age, with the right setting, that my older brother and I were allowed the sort of free-ranging exploration that might enable a kid to stumble into fairyland. There was a great deal of potential in the large park of Havlíčkovy Sady that was only a few blocks away from our apartment.
I got better, eventually, at locating and identifying fantasy portals. The little cottage I rented in Oakland when I first moved there had eldritch horrors living in the dank, moist crawlspace. It was built on a bit of uneven ground, so the front door was at ground level, but the back had dropped off enough that there was perhaps 3-4 feet of emptiness (the echoing emptiness of a damned soul) beneath the floor. The cuts in the floor around the plumbing for the claw-footed bathtub were just enough larger than the pipes to allow something to creep through in the dead of night…
A friend of mine in Berkeley had an inter-dimensional portal in her basement. Part of the basement was semi-finished and used for storage, but if you slipped past the walls into the unfinished part, you'd reach the area where past fractures in the fabric of reality had left their traces. It was only waiting for accidental triggering by the mock rituals of a role-playing game in the living room above to open once more…
I haven't written any of those stories. I noodled around a bit with the inter-dimensional portal one, which involved taking the questing team that came through off to an SF convention to recruit some heroes to take back with them. The story fizzled out because other ideas inspired me more. But Unicorn Control Systems…that just might have potential.
* * *
[1] There is a software management system named UNICORN. It is possible that this is the one being referenced.
Yesterday, I was searching in the Controlled Document database at work, trying to remember the right keywords to find the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for handling in-process material that is restricted due to an on-going investigation. At one point, I gave up and did a sledge-hammer level search, which meant visually reviewing five pages of document titles belonging to the most likely correct department. And that's how I stumbled across the fact that my workplace has an SOP entitled "Operation of Unicorn Control Systems".
Unicorn Control Systems.
My first thought was that I had either misread "Uniform", or that it was a typo (these things happen). The reality is much less interesting. [1] But for just one moment there, a story opened up where a mild-mannered biotech pharmaceutical company had a secret identity involving management of supernatural creatures. And ordinarily all evidence of this activity would be hidden behind firewalls and passwords, but due to a fleeting security glitch and an unexpected keyword search, a tantalizing clue pops up…
That story could go a lot of places. I'm not likely to take it to any of them. But when people ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" the answer is usually, "You're soaking in them."
I've always had a fascination for the stories where a chance encounter reveals the fantasy living side-by-side with everyday life. When I was a kid, I guess it was my favorite escapism (well, second favorite, after the one where the aliens from another dimension contacted me to take me home). You turn the corner and there's a little door, just six inches high, hidden behind the wall hanging, and just as you spot it, someone on the other side pulls it firmly shut. You sit beside the forest pond, staring into the dark waters, and then you notice that some…thing is staring back up at you. You climb up into the attic on a rainy winter afternoon and pry open the old trunk that has been sitting there since your grandmother was a girl, and inside it you find…
My childhood was largely devoid of locations that held that kind of potential. I grew up in a suburb of San Diego that was so brand new that we'd picked the empty lot and the house model and watched them build it. That makes it hard to imagine hidden mysteries. (I did leave a mystery for the future. Hidden inside a wall that was part of some remodeling we did when I was a teenager is a folded piece of paper with a long message written in my first con-lang. I'll never know if anyone ever finds it and wonders, but I like to imagine it happening.) There were a few places with potential in the enormous old house my grandparents lived in in Portland. But as I recall, I first started actively looking for those intersections with other worlds when I was ten years old and we were living in Prague.
It wasn't that the apartment house we lived in was full of mysterious nooks and corners -- no, it was a standard Soviet Brutalist apartment block, mysterious only for how one could fit a family of six into a two-bedroom unit without bloodshed. But that year I discovered a number of authors who relied on those sideways doors into fantasy -- I especially remember the Borrowers series by Mary Norton -- and I was of the right age, with the right setting, that my older brother and I were allowed the sort of free-ranging exploration that might enable a kid to stumble into fairyland. There was a great deal of potential in the large park of Havlíčkovy Sady that was only a few blocks away from our apartment.
I got better, eventually, at locating and identifying fantasy portals. The little cottage I rented in Oakland when I first moved there had eldritch horrors living in the dank, moist crawlspace. It was built on a bit of uneven ground, so the front door was at ground level, but the back had dropped off enough that there was perhaps 3-4 feet of emptiness (the echoing emptiness of a damned soul) beneath the floor. The cuts in the floor around the plumbing for the claw-footed bathtub were just enough larger than the pipes to allow something to creep through in the dead of night…
A friend of mine in Berkeley had an inter-dimensional portal in her basement. Part of the basement was semi-finished and used for storage, but if you slipped past the walls into the unfinished part, you'd reach the area where past fractures in the fabric of reality had left their traces. It was only waiting for accidental triggering by the mock rituals of a role-playing game in the living room above to open once more…
I haven't written any of those stories. I noodled around a bit with the inter-dimensional portal one, which involved taking the questing team that came through off to an SF convention to recruit some heroes to take back with them. The story fizzled out because other ideas inspired me more. But Unicorn Control Systems…that just might have potential.
* * *
[1] There is a software management system named UNICORN. It is possible that this is the one being referenced.
