Ideas
Where ideas come from tends to be a slippery thing to catch, not unlike an angry weasel dipped in warm Vaseline. The more you grab, the more it slithers away and tries to snap your precious typing finger off. Rather than track the ideas back to the start, I prefer to simply accept they have bubbled up from somewhere and go with them. In a way, this is like walking a tight wire (or so I imagine it). Never once think, “How am I keeping my balance? What if I slip?” You just keep going and trust instincts.

Ideas come in bushel baskets. By the ton. Even more from the sky like manna. I have ideas I’ll never get around to writing but want to. The real trick of writing isn’t, for me, thinking up the ideas but deciding which are worth pursuing enough to invest my time and effort. Time, after all, is a writer’s most precious commodity (right after a purring cat but before the bottle of Maker’s Mark).

Burn the Sky was my first story in what might be called a post-Singularity universe. A long time ago I read all I could about O’Neill colonies, huge spinning cylinders that would house millions of people in space. Those had to go into the story, along with mind-swapping, cloning, weird cultures on each of a lot of colonies and, of course, defining characters with unusual talents and missions. After the movie Transporter, the idea of a courier is pretty well mined, but not if the cargo is someone’s personality and memories—and that person is vital to the survival of the O’Neill colonies. There it was: story and characters.

I loved the way Burn the Sky turned out and found myself forced to pick from a lot of other worthy ideas for a followup story. On Wings of Plague develops more of the back story for this universe but also introduces a couple more characters that intrigued me. Pajarita—Rita for short—wanted to fly. The central axis of the O’Neill colonies would be zero-g and perfect for human-powered flight. She wants the wings surgically attached and an infomorph jacked into the constant torrent of information, Wiki-tiki-tavi mentioned in “Burn the Sky,” hires her for a peculiar data gathering mission. The story supplies not only the background of Earth but also something about the morals and outlook of the colony inhabitants—all mixed in with deadly plague and extreme body modification.

This story suggested another, as yet unnamed, but it has to do with a twist in perspective. Nihilists are everywhere in this universe. Why not follow one and examine his reasons for being a mad bomber? People can be logical without being rational. And touch on a unique method of waste disposal and even more of the strange goings-on in the O-colonies? It’s in the works.

Bob Vardeman
www.cenotaphroad.com