by Alice Gaines Readers often ask authors where their ideas come from. The true, and not very interesting, response is "from everywhere and anywhere." Sometimes it can be an item in a newspaper or the content of a dream. Even a common phrase will get a writer thinking. Often the germ of the idea gets buried in our brains for years, and the exact stimulus for the idea is lost from memory.

In contrast, I remember the exact place where I was sitting when I thought up Wonderslut. I can't tell you the exact date, but I was sitting at my desk at my day job one day in 1996 when she came to life in my brain.

We'd had a company electronic bulletin board where employees could post personal messages and other silliness. We "old-timers" on the board were a clever and creative lot, at least in our own minds. Literate, insightful, entertaining, our posts were everything the humdrum world was not. We were the intelligentsia, la crème de la crème.

And then, the others arrived. >[? Rank newbies took over our beloved board, filling it with inanities, misspellings, and bad grammar. Horrors! We rallied privately and formed an organization to retake our board. We named it something with the initials J-L-A. (I told you we were creative.) We all adopted superhero identities. As I had a reputation for writing things with S-E-X in them, I took the superhero concept of Wonder and added Slut. Wonderslut.

Then, Wonderslut needed an everyday alter-ego. I'd always been fascinated with orchids, so I made her an orchid hybridist, and I made up the silliest name I could imagine. Felicity Plumswindle, mild-mannered orchid hybridist, also came to life.

Fast forward about nine years. One of the authors at Changeling asked why we had a category for Comic Book Hero books with no books in it. The publisher answered that she'd always wanted to do Comic Book Heroes, but no one had submitted any. I remembered Wonderslut and added Avenger of the Non-Orgasmic so she had a heroic mission in life. Then, I started writing.

The Adventures of Wonderslut came out on Friday, June 16, 2006 - ten years after I originally thought her up.

I can honestly say that I've never enjoyed writing anything more than Wonderslut. Writers often say that their characters think things up and surprise them. Actually, what we mean is that we surprise ourselves. I imagined a crimson Maserati with a jet engine and retractable wings. I imagined a superpower that'll never make it into a Hollywood movie. I imagined a young, impressionable sidekick with an agenda of his own. What fun.

I'm currently in the middle of writing the second installation of Wonderslut's adventures: Fast and Furious. Ideas keep popping out at me from the back of my brain, and my only job is to write them down. I think on some level I'm embracing my inner Wonderslut, and I couldn't be happier. She's an awesome lady.