Thursday, November 19, 2009
Q: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
A: I don't know, but wherever it is, everybody is on vacation.
I'm tired and frustrated today-- Thursdays are my longest days, with both jobs and then choir keeping me out of the house from 8 AM to 10 PM-- and I'm drawing a blank on witty things to say. Instead, I'll post something from my huge file of incomplete story ideas. Some of the ideas are full pages, some are outlines, some are just one or two quotes I know I want in something someday. If you have similar things, feel free to post them as well. If you have ideas for where mine ought to go, same deal. Right now, I got nothin'.
"My brothers and sisters have perfectly ordinary names—John and David, the eldest, and then Sarah and Maria and Thomas—but my mother, when I was born, would not hear of any other name for me than Barbara. My father was somewhat taken aback—I was the first girl, and he had wanted to name me Alice, after a recently late aunt. He spent a week attempting to wheedle my mother into a more suitable choice, but she would have her way, so Barbara I stayed.
I suppose it’s a fairly common name now, but when I was born children were not named Barbara, as a rule. To my mother it must have been exotic, the syllables remnant of the coarse speech of avenging queens. I hated it growing up, hated it even more when it came back into vogue a generation later when I was naming my own children. My girls brought home a half-dozen little Barbaras as playmates; I cringed every time a new one was introduced. Barbara. What a barbarous thing to name a child."
EDIT: You know, I almost forgot: Scott Adams. What a barbarous thing to name a child.
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What?? No shout out to Scott "Barbara" Adams? Actually, Steve wondered aloud whether Scott Adams would bother to Google his own name as it may be a rather common one.