The Avocado of Inspiration (now with bigger pits!) by Kat Richardson:

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"Where do you get your ideas?" There's a question many writers dread. Not because they order them wholesale from a warehouse in Schenectady, as a famous SF writer once quipped, but because ideas aren't the hard part. Not really. Ideas are like breakfast cereal; there're more than I can possibly consume in a lifetime, but the real trick is finding the ones that don't go soggy and getting my procrastinating backside into a chair and my fingers on the keyboard often enough and long enough to turn them into a story-meal worth serving up.

I have eight linear feet of spiral-bound notebooks full of ideas from my high school days alone. Most of them seem to be the soggy-going kind, unfortunately--emo young wizards in alternate dimensions, Romances featuring fiery half-Irish Californios, dead detectives reincarnated as Afghan hounds... But there are sometimes bits of delicious, crunchy idea buried in the self-absorbed sog. So I keep the notebooks around, carefully stacked in a waterproof box. I don't use them very often, however.

Usually my ideas come from something I read, or heard--or misread or misheard--or some vagrant thought that broke free of its mental branch and came bouncing in on my conscious mind like a California avocado falling on an unsuspecting Mercedes. Which was the case with Bad Guy of the Month. This is what happened and it's typical of the way my avocado bounces--erm... that is, the way my mind stirs up ideas.

I suppose I've heard the phrase before, but while skimming various Internet sites, it caught my eye and then it crept into my brain: "Bad Guy of the Month." Was that like "book of the month" or "wine of the month"? Of course not. It was just a phrase some people used to indicate a criminal of no distinction--just another Darwin Award waiting to happen. But still my brain churned the phrase from "bad guy of the month" to "Bad Guy of the Month Club."

Perhaps it was a service one could subscribe to and receive a bad guy (or a complete set!) every month, delivered to your door. But what would you do with him? Or he with you? Were they real people? Maybe they were robots. And were there separate subscription plans for Villains of the Month and Minions of the Month? Possibly there was the Professional Villain package--in which prime henchmen were mailed in to the Secret Headquarters every second Wednesday--and the Professional Hero package--which provided Villains ripe for the foiling.

But what if you weren't a professional Villain or Hero? What if you were just a talented amateur who wanted a challenge? A nice, predictable Bad Guy to overcome or outsmart, just to sharpen up your skills--or keep them up since retirement, the sort of thing Mr. Incredible could have really used. But let's not get too far afield. Let's stick with the amateur.

Well, she ought to be a female, I think, since women are the traditional victims of Bad Guys of many descriptions. A young woman, perhaps recently out of college. Someone with some real talents but not willing to let everyone know she's got them--the way some of us won't admit we can change a diaper or do the laundry without setting the towels on fire. An apparently hapless sort of woman, a real Plain Jane no one would ever suspect of having leet ninjar skilz. I'd say she's a librarian, but... well, that's such a cliche.

So, Jane Hapless, secret heroine, subscribes to the Bad Guy of the Month Club--personal edition. Every month, one lowlife or another slinks to Jane's door and attempts to get the better of her, and every month Jane bests them. Sometimes they aren't even much of a challenge--they aren't terribly smart or dangerous since they are Minion edition rejects. She's almost bored with it and thinking of canceling her subscription in favor of a nice basket of fruit from Harry and David every third Saturday. Until one month when Jane finds a very Bad Guy lurking near her door and realizes half-way through kick-boxing him into submission that she's already had her Bad Guy of the Month....

But once she's knocked him silly, she can't ask him if he really is a Bonus Bad Guy and is entirely unprepared when yet more human scum bent on doing her dirt start showing up. Oh what has gone wrong--or right--for Jane? Where are all the bad guys coming from and what do they want from her? Surely they aren't all monthly shipments? Or are they? Just what twisted plot is brewing at the Bad Guy of the Month Club and why are they after Jane?

Ah, yes: Jane Hapless and the Bad Guy of the Month Club is now well on its way to burbling out of my brain--if it doesn't go soggy first. But I'm not going to tell you any more, because that would be the whole story. And I'm not quite done with Jane.....

And thus does the Avocado of Inspiration bounce on the hood of my Storyteller's Mercedes of Outrageous Hyperbole. Maybe I should just stop parking it there.

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Kat Richardson

Poltergeist

Harper Blaine

Greywalker

detective

supernatural

murder

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