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Where Do You Get Your Ideas? June 29, 2001

It should be obvious by now to those of you checking in that I don’t often follow the crowd… so I’m tipping you off early I’m going to address this one seriously.

Last weekend, I was on the phone with my five year old nephew, who called to tell me that he could see Mars from the back porch of his house.

"I know you got the idea for your comic book by looking at the moon," he said, "and I got an idea for one by looking at Mars, so I will make you a comic book."

I look forward to reading it, I said.

"Do you get other ideas from looking up into the sky?"

I had to admit that sometimes I did, and I had a very heart-warming con versation with him, because, you know, "Where do you get your ideas?" is a very charming question. From a five year old. After I got off the phone, it occurred to me that I get an email asking me this very question about five times a day, from people considerably older than five. I usually respond, since I’m kind of a wise-ass, that I get my ideas the same place David Gerrold does, from a guy who’s got a Post Office box in Pennsylvania. You send this anonymous box-holder twenty dollars a month, with a personal check drawn to "Cash" or a money order without the name filled in, and a week later an envelope with no postmark arrives with the ten ideas I get to write about that month. Sometimes I tell people that when my grandmother on my mother’s side died, she left to me in her will a stained, corrugated cardboard box with oddly out-of-place leather hinges. Said to be brought over by my grandfa ther, from the old country, it had been willed to her for me upon his death from emphysema in 1970. In it contains, clearly written on tanned lamb skin, in a deliberate Gypsy hand, every idea I will ever have. I take one or two out of the box as needed. Sometimes I tell people there are thirteen old men in a cabin in Vermont who eat venison jerky and tell each other lies and drink fermented maple syrup and who have had all the good ideas safely ensconced in a dry cel lar beneath their lodging at the side of an abandoned reservoir somewhere

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