Where I Get My Ideas

Okay, so a while back I posted some smartassey replies to the "where do you get your ideas" thing, but I realize that I never really answered the question seriously, and I know you're all twitching and foaming with suspense. Because we all know that suspense is foamy. Like a cappucino. Or espresso. I don't really know; I don't drink coffee.

You think I'm random NOW? You should see me on coffee. You could hook me up to a generator and run Disneyland.

Anyway, you're all foamy because you want to know where I get my ideas so you can steal them, right? Well, I'm sorry to tell you that my ideas are unstealable. I get all of my ideas from my ex-boyfriends. So you'll just have to keep foaming. Or get an antibiotic; either way, you're not taking my ideas.

True story: I used to work at a very depressing place, where I was coordinating autopsies for people whose loved ones were dying or had just died. And my work was valuable and important and all that rot, but it wasn't exactly a laugh riot. A good day was a day when someone didn't cry at me.

I'm a trained crisis counselor, by the by. Doesn't that frighten you?

So my one rule was that no matter how busy I was, I would go down to the hospital cafeteria and eat lunch with my guys. One was the Fed Ex guy, the other delivered the gas. Both very important dudes in the hospital world, and both incredibly sarcastic and snarftastic. We put together a radio show called Bill Dead Guy, and I got to be the femme fatale, and the hero was a corpse. Now THAT was fun. I got to speak in a perky little voice and say things like: "Oh, Bill, you're so studly!"

Anywho. I used to tell the guys stories about my ex-boyfriends during lunch when we weren't making radio shows. On a good day, I could get one of them to snarf, and stuff would come out their noses, and that made me happy, which sounds weird but is still true. And at the time, I was still writing the serious books that were all valuable and important and had lots of dead things in them, but not the funny kinds of dead things that lurch and foam. (I'm all about the foam today. Dunno what gives with that.) And then, I said to myself, "Hey, idjit. If your stories are so funny, why not make THEM the basis of a book?" And I replied, "Don't call me idjit."

But I wrote the book and populated it with a few of my many exes, with the details changed to protect the not-so-innocent. And it gained me an agent. So at least those mutant numnum-heads were good for something. You think I'm being harsh? I dated a guy who got a cue ball stuck in his mouth. THAT's harsh.

At least it wasn't a foamy cue ball. Which doesn't really make sense, but I had to bring it around full circle somehow, didn't I?