by Fiona Jayde As the song goes, lets start from the very beginning. Ideas. Where do you get them and how they make a story? And what the hell does it mean when an author, a mentor or the eight year old next door says "Oh, I get them everywhere"? Maybe ideas really can come from "everywhere". The trick is to grasp them in your hot little hand and put them somewhere where you can later find them. It's a bit of an effort but the more you consciously open yourself to "finding them" the more they will smack you on the head as they fly at you from every direction.

Now let us stop theorizing and take it into practice.

Where's "everywhere"? "Everywhere" is the world around you. Books, movies, television, net. Internet is an amazing source of ideas.

Let's take news.google.com. There's the obvious political/world news stories that could be a sources of ideas. Or … "Boston Marathon run in space station." What would that be like? How can they run without gravity? What if the station had grav fields but someone sabotaged it to win the race and won a lot of money and then was killed?

Half the time you don't even need to read the news-story-the title itself will spark off questions that will lead to other questions. And other questions can lead to a story.

A great source for ideas and titles for concepts are websites selling products. To list a few examples:

Benefits cosmetics at BenefitCosmetics.com. There's a foundation called "Some Kind-a Gorgeous." What can we come up with for a story fitting that title? We could of course have the hero be a gorgeous man. But what if we have a gorgeous sword? (Euphemism? You be the judge) Or how about a warewolf girl with gorgeous silver fur and clear blue eyes who in her human form is mousy and shy and can't get a man if she stood up and howled?

Let's look at another example. A website that sells naughty wear -- Forplaycatalog.com. Product titles: "Sultry Midnight"… "Night Games"... "Sweetest Dreams"… "Midnight Vixen".

I'm liking "Night Games". What games are played at night? Sex games! So what if we have an underground sex club where someone dies and our hero goes in to investigate. He meets our beautiful heroine and isn't above using her to get info. What he doesn't know is that our heroine is the dead person's sister or best friend or even a federal agent investigating her partner's death …

Let's try another example. I like cops and bodyguards and private detectives. Let's Google it. (Isn't it funny how Google is a verb now?)

I see a website called offdutyofficers.com. "Off Duty." There's a concept. Maybe he is a cop who is pulled into an off duty investigation? Or maybe he is forced off duty by our heroine who is with Internal Affairs agent and suspects him of all sorts of nasty things. They need to find a way to trust each other to bring down the big drug lord who framed our hero in the first place.

The possibilities are endless. After a while, they will start coming to you unbidden, when you can't sleep or when you're driving and see a sign that says "Dead End" or when you are watching a movie about a serial killer and think to yourself -- if we make that serial killer a vampire we can really cook with it.

Now to really put things in a twist, let's combine the ideas. What if we have a shy silver furred werewolf girl whose brother disappeared from a sex club and gets a makeover and goes in to find clues about him? Our cop hero unofficially checks out this club because he keeps getting reports of supposed vampire activity and what cop in his right mind would believe in vamps? Being a hero, he goes in on his own time. Off duty, if I haven't hammered that nail enough. He meets our shy but decked out heroine and tries to get information out of her. Our villain is a nasty serial killer vamp… Good thing I'm writing all this down!

As a working example let us consider DisArmed, the second installment in my Sci-Fi series titled GrimJustin. My heroine -- Kara Dillon -- is infected with a chemical. Things tend to explode when she bleeds on them.

Idea source? I started the manuscript around Christmas time when the news was full of travelers. So I got the idea of someone hiding a chemical inside themselves. Unless people knew to scan for it, it would be untraceable.

Another plot point of the story is the hero -- Halloway Duke -- not believing Kara's reason for betraying him. (She was tortured into it by bad guys, but being a stubborn ass, Duke doesn't believe her).

I needed something solid, something more tangible as evidence of her ordeal. This was around the time I started running and my knees were killing me. FLASHPOINT! The bad guys could have shattered Kara's knees and not repaired them properly. So Duke sees the evidence and fights himself for wanting to believe her, being too mad to believe her, being pissed at whoever did this to her … Granted the knee idea wasn't pulled from the headlines, but I bitched so much about it, it could have been.

So fine, we have ideas. What the hell are we to do with them?

It really depends on the author's preferred method of organizing thoughts. Being a computer geek I have an email address specifically for ideas. As soon as something sparks my brain I email myself. I may not use all of them, half the time I may not even look at them. But they are there when I need them.

For the technology inclined there are programs that let you sort snippets, notes, etc and organize them in infinite possibilities.

Some people prefer the card method. Write the titles and the questions that follow on an index card and store them in a shoebox or in a neatly organized card catalog with dividers for Sci-Fi or Historical or Suspense, Vamps and Werewolves or whatever else fits.

However you organize them, however you get a hold of them, ideas are out there. We just need to grab them and the rest as they say, is a song.