It’s a good day. No one’s shooting at me, and all members of the household are accounted for.
Yesterday, the Maine Coon mix cat disappeared for 8 hours, and shortly after my husband and I gave up and were saying things to each other like “Well, he’s microchipped” and “We’ll contact Animal Control as soon as the three-day weekend is over”… he opened the door to the garage (where we’d looked over ten times), and let himself into the house as though nothing was wrong. (17 pounds of Floof, and yes, he can operate lever-type handles on doors. They seemed like a great idea when we got the house. Now we keep the outside doors deadbolted at all times…)
I’m guessing, by the massive hairball he horked on the kitchen floor at 3 am, that he wasn’t feeling great, and hid out of reflex. I’m not upset with him. I’m not even upset with the ancient arthritic Kili-Cat, who is jealous of all the commotion he got yesterday, and wants reassurance that she is the center of the household’s universe.
Heck, I even got words, which weren’t coming when my brain was busy running through the layout of the entire house, trying to find a cat-sized hole that hadn’t been checked. And I finally found a place to put the (true) story about the time customs had to figure out how to care for roughly 100 baby turtles that had survived being stuffed in a pair of boots. (The smuggler had stuffed 200 baby turtles in the boots, and roughly half of them were still alive when Customs pulled the package as suspicious, opened it, and started making frantic phone calls.)
I have a couple folders of bookmarks of interesting little stories and factoids that cry out ot be used in a story eventually. Some of the folders are by the WIP (or no longer in progress), and more is stuffed in one just named “Writing Fodder.”
As for Floof… if I don’t forget, his antics are inevitably going to end up as a minor trauma in some quiet story, especially the casual attitude of “Duuude. Why the fuss?” as he sauntered back to help himself to some food, and sprawl on the floor.
How do you save the little ideas and asides that cry out to be used?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Fun Little Asides”
Step One, write it down!
My “Ideas and Starts” file has twenty-one items . . .
“Working” has five . . .
And saved from several computers ago . . . “Old Files => Story Ideas” has twenty-two . . . OMG, I’d forgotten about those . . . some of those were fun ideas . . .
Good grief . . . Refugees form the GeneWars? Paul Bunyan’s Grandkids?
Dorothy! I am seventy-one years old, I simply do not have time to . . . Space Catz? OMG . . .
Prince Bishop, Actress . . .
Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Scraps of paper (mostly 5″x8″, but whatever I have at the time inspiration hits) titled by destination book designation (N5 = Novel 5 of WIP) standing as an upright stack on the desk behind the laptop held together by binder clips, to be looked through periodically when I start a new series entry or look hard at an older near-finished one. I read them as a whole from time to time to remind myself where the series and its people are going (modifying the note in passing as necessary).
When I start a new series entry, I may digest all of its notes into a digital file for sorted and printable reference, correcting ahead of time as needed to eliminate things that became dead ends. Some of the notes underlying descriptions of people/circumstances/etc. also get entered into the Scrivener series bible, after use (when it becomes canon, not before), correcting as necessary.
notebooks and notebooks and more notebooks. One at a time. Tired of one notebook? Keep filling it up and pick out its successor now.
When I was a teen, I read about something in ancient Egypt. I poked at it as a story idea every now and again, until decades later, when it casually revealed that the character who appeared as a filthy, ragged, reclusive man living among tombs — in ancient times — was in reality a clean well-dressed Victorian English maiden.
Magic of the Lost God fell rapidly into place then.
But I have a WIP in progress, because I had an idea for an isekai titled Is Philosopher an Option? where the heroine did ask the title question when asked what class she wanted to be. It didn’t progress much further — until I stole another idea and mixed them together. The problem was the new result was sufficiently darker than the original title is too light-hearted.
So progress occurs, anonymously.
I don’t have any good places to store ideas … I’ll write stuff down and then lose it.
However, the topic reminded me of a passage from Dorothy Sayers, _Gaudy Night_. After Harriet has been given lessons in self-defense, she sits down and (paraphrasing here) starts to turn the experience into fodder for a novel as, she says, is the novelist’s (adjective) habit. It would do, she thinks for the scene where the wart, Everard, is due to seduce the glamorous but neglected wife, Sheila.
Even when I write stuff down and read it again, oftentimes the plot bunny hopped off. Such is the writer’s life.
Got myself in the habit of using Keep Note on my phone. See something, say something. 😀
Notes… on the computer, the phone, paper, or whatever! 🙂 It’s even ‘more’ fun when you find them six months later, looking for something else…LOL