Free Floating Ideas

I get writing ideas all the time. I just don't do anything with them. I thought I'd share a few, a view of the flowers in my mind.

In Star Trek the Vulcan Mr. Spock would elegantly place the tips of his long fingers on your face and remove painful memories. I always thought that an amazing idea and wanted to do that in a book. Once memories are removed that you can't get over, a person could start again. I had an idea of a rogue psychiatrist on a private island doing just that for a woman crippled with anxiety and fear of leaving her home. This new experimental treatment would remove memories but maybe they went too far...maybe she becomes so robustly new that the guy is knocked out by this transformation and falls for her. This, of course, is a romance. Who has not lost much needed confidence and been drug down by abuse or loss and sure we survive but we're not the same. If we could start anew there would be this innocence and this love of life that children have I believe. A whole new world, surely.

What if the world economy did collapse? Would we return to a life of small farms and growing our own food? It might be a better world. Our ancestors had more free time than us, once the harvest was in and winter arrived it was a time for games and stories and people visited one another. It might be quite nice.

What if women ran the world? I don't think that women want to do that but they certainly could. I think men and women work best in partnership, maybe that is the way it's supposed to be. If women recieved some sort of power that elevated them into leadership, they would do what they had to do of course. I just wonder what sort of world it would be. In Ursula LeGuin's book, "The Left Hand of Darkness" people on a planet named Winter could change genders. Man and woman in the same body, what a concept! I think what she meant was that just as light is the left hand of darkness, so women are the other side of humanity. We are polar opposites and we are supposed to be equal, even if society says we are not. Male and female, like right and left, light and darkness or yin and yang. She doesn't really lecture about equal rights, she just tells this story and you draw your own conclusions. I like the power of stories to do that, and she is no slouch at world building either. The Dune books also remind us of the power of the female sex, the Ben Gesserit that the author modeled after his own wife. What a great woman she must have been! The great point in this book was "Revenge is for babies". I had to think about that before I got it. What I think Frank Herbert meant was okay, somebody did something to you and you want revenge but it is immature. If you deviate from your life plan to chase after revenge then you have wasted your valuable time and damaged yourself in the process. A mature adult realizes this and does not chase after revenge but picks himself up and continues. I think that is what the author meant. It is true. I think this is one of the things I like the most about books, these nuggets of knowledge that you pick up like golden coins in the sand. Women were very important in the Dune books, and they were the teachers of the men. In this fantasy world, the women could and did fight in hand to hand combat and it was balance and knowing your opponent's next move and being focused that mattered, not the male's superior strength. These books are heady stuff, impossible to describe really, if you have not read them. If I started to describe them I would be blogging for an hour or more. I think these books are so famous that most people have read them I guess, I don't really know. My library, who isn't big on science fiction has them at least.

A lot of romance books has the couple hating each other, it is like almost tradition or something. In a way, I am drawn in as always but I long for something new. Paranormal is dominating the market right now it seems, who knew vampires and werewolves would be hot? People do fall for each other and my hubby himself claims he loved me at first sight. Romance is not my natural reading material, rather I find myself reading it because there is just so much of it around. I'm told half of all books sold are romances and that is a lot of books. I like these books very much sometimes and sometimes not so much. Maybe it's me, but I don't understand some of them. I have no desire to be dominated by another, even if that other is totally beautiful and handsome. What I want is someone to talk to who doesn't mind laundry. Friendship and love together would be so much fun, I think that is what I want.