Waiting to Happen

Ideas, ideas, ideas. Where do they come from? That is no mystery as far as I'm concerned. How can people can NOT have them? Now that's a concept that stumps me.

My leisurely Sunday morning read of a standard publication revealed that there's an upcoming movie called Safety Not Guaranteed about three magazine employees who answer an advertisement seeking a time-travel companion. It is, no doubt, based on this ad which was doing the rounds a few years ago and which was no doubt filed away in many writerly notebooks and hard drives, including, obviously, mine. There'll be a lot of folk now raising a clenched fist to the heavens and moaning Curses, I was too slow. Not me - I hadn't started on anything yet, but the fact remains that it was there on my hard drive waiting, waiting, waiting for the right cross-fertilization. Mind you, I was going with a title more along the lines of Bring Your Own Weapons.


In the same publication they wrote about the upcoming Napoleon exhibition, which will focus on the emperor's antipodean connections. In that article there was the solid foundation for an alternative time-line story - Napoleon wanted to send an explorer to claim Australia's south coast and call it Terre Napoleon. There was the interesting fact that the last book that Marie Antoinette was said to have read was Captain James Cook's account of his voyages - how can you not see the seeds of a sad story in that? And apparently Josephine established  a 70 acre estate called Malmaison which had a greenhouse full of Australian plants and a private zoo with kangaroos, emus and a black swan. Another cool set up.

All you have to do is observe, you've got to read, you've got to note down, hoard ingredients, constantly stir them, stick it in your brain-oven, wait (sometimes for years) and see what happens. Then the hard work begins.

Now, I'm off for coffee and a Sunday morning chat - another good source of ideas.