Sort of an anniversary

It's been 52 weeks since I started the "post a bit of fiction each Friday" thing. Once I didn't post anything. Once you got a list of "very short stories" gathered from my Twitter account. Ten times I missed the Friday time window, though I think with one or two exceptions it was Friday somewhere in the world still. And forty times, it just plain worked. A few were rushed and half-arsed, but, over all, it worked.

I am very happy about this.

Since I am interested in tracing ideas, and at least one reader might find this interesting, here are some thoughts on the origins of my ideas:

Stretching Limits
A pre-made pen&paper RPG module from the game The Dark Eye had a little trick: One of the monsters guarding a particular magician's home looked like a very powerful and relatively well known class of demon, which should have been entirely unexpected, since the magician was not known to be in the habit of summoning demons. Only it wasn't really a demon, but a wood golem carved and painted to look like it, rather than like a rough human figure. That's where I got the general idea of non-humanoid golems. The other bit, mundane uses for magic, rather than just offensive ones, interest me.

Wizards have no sense of humour
What can I say? I like birds. :P

Hopeless Romantic
Years ago I wrote a longer story, but lost the file. Basically this is the core. The traditional-negative image of fae I probably first found in Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.

Lateral Wording
My first language is German, but sometimes I feel like most of my communication happens online in English. Naturally, questions of "how do you translate that?" crop up often.

Spirit of Exploration
Nico is curious. It should get her into trouble sometimes.

At the Bottom of the Garden
I'm not sure anymore, but I think I dreamed of those odd gnomes.

A Real Pest
I'd been talking about six word stories with Mutt, who claims to loathe cats and sort-of-has several, and I came up with "Then the pixies ate my cat." Somehow it needed a little expansion.

Natural Remedies
Author tract. :D
Honestly, I prefer not-so-hard medicine when it makes sense, but the attitude of "if it's herbal, it's healthy" is pretty silly.

Odd Partners
The "replace required magic circles with an illusion" bit is another thing I encountered in The Dark Eye materials.

Commentary on the History of Firearms
Basically a bit of exposition about Nico and Daaren. :P

Travelogue
Entering a book is a rather common fantasy motive. Neverending Story looms pretty big there, but there's also Thursday Next, and a lot of other stuff.

Fangs Don't Help
She's the only character of mine where I have an "official" Alternate continuity version (excluding the "knows they are characters living in my brain" stuff).
I'd been talking with Mutt about details of the whole vampire-shapeshifting thing. As to the particular shape... Bats are terribly cliché. The first source that had another shape that I came across was Vampire in Brooklyn, but I didn't want to go with a wolf because those are too potentially dangerous. A cat is not entirely helpless, but not really a threat for your average human, and it seemed to suit Xan, too.

Mantle and Sword
The "talking magic sword" idea taken a step further/combined with the idea of possession.

Writing on the Wall
I like how they play off each other. Not sure if I can put it into stories anything near like it's in my head, though.
There may well be some Gearworld triggering that idea.

Chilling Effect
There was more to that story in my head, but I din't write it due to nerves and a lack of plot, and I can pinpoint the first inspiration for that unwritten story exactly: Scott McCloud in Making Comics claiming that the Fantastic Four are based on the four classic elements. (Which made me go "WTF", because my definition of water does not stretch to include rubber.)
Pretty much anything I come up with with humans with supernatural powers in a modern setting would have to have the X-Men somewhere in the influences list, even if just "but I want to do it better" (meaning "in a different way, which is more to my tastes", of course, not objectively better. I just consider a lot of superhero-comic tropes silly.)

Illumination
I'd been talking with Mutt about what souls are and if my characters had them, and decided to come up with a sort of unexpected ... thingy.

Human Affairs
I like elves. I want to include them in my writing. However, I want to avoid writing them as a Mary-Sue-species that most of everybody else thinks is prettier and better and such. So, yeah.

Plenty
The thought crossed my mind while going through my copy of Grimms' Fairy Tales. However, she's gotten around a lot, so she probably did pass through a place like that at some or other point.

Patterns
If I remember correctly, I came across a blog post which showed advertisments for diamond engagement rings, and pointed out how distasteful the whole "buy women with presents" idea was. "You don't get to decide who I am" thing is something I feel very strongly about, so, basically, author tract here.

Heroic Delusions
Superhero schtick, obviously. The "coccoon" thing... There was one episode of X-Files which had some kind of monster that hibernated for decades between bouts of hunger (for human livers, if I remember correctly), and built some kind of coocoon. The date of one of the newspapers played a role in there somewhere.

Dark Thoughts
Taken out of an idea for a longer story with a Journey to the center of the mind plot.

All the Nuts
Uh, there were those two ATCs/ACEOs I drew: The first and the sequel.

Grey
Just trying to dredge up one of the neglected ones of my characters. It's jsut the basic idea.

Party Plans
There are ways to annoy Nico, but if a prank/attempt to tease her doesn't hit one, said attempt may backfire. (The best target for something that'll likely work would be her curiosity.)
I wanted to build that idea into a loose-canon storyboard, but there were some problems due to miscommunication.

The Right Words
Ehwell. Daaren doesn't have that "the thinner the better" mindset we are fed nowadays, and he's pretty darn perceptive when it comes to people, so he had a good chance of picking up that she wasn't as happy as she tried to look. Still, that was a very lucky guess there.

Chances
I suspect the little robot belonging to Gyro Gearloose is in there somewhere... And when I think of artificial people, I first think of Johnny 5 (Short Circuit movies), C3PO and R2D2, and the golems in Feet of Clay.

Every Prison is Oz
That's the name of a trope over at tvtropes.org. I guess it refers to a series I had never heard of before. Using a one-way-worldgate to get rid of undesirables was something Snog used in one of his stories, and I think the cute animals bit goes back to an image I saw on Scans Daily of Wolverine and unicorns and/or giant fluffy bunnies.

Parasites
'nother attempt at writing about one of my characters who has been neglected. Don't remember where I got the idea from anymore, the basic bits had been in my head quite a while.
This is one of the few relatively nice scenes in my mind for Gabriel; generally he is less sympathetic than this, but, well, he's not only a douchebag. Might lead to confusion posting it like that, without the (mostly unwritten) rest.
Nymphs are more malleable than vampires, never having been humans. They also are not as bad for other people's health.

Breakaway
The inspiration for that one came from a photo I found on deviantart, showing a cabin at the very edge of a lake. Unfortunately I forgot to bookmark it.

An Awkward Job
I remember a tea drinking dragon from one of the openings of Disney's Gummi Bears, though I've seen stuff like that elsewhere, too (e.g. Tea With The Griffin by Ursula Vernon), and I blame Tad Williams for there being a spear involved rather than a sword (though, really, a weapon with long reach seems sensible when facing a very big animal, no?)

Dreaming the World Better
I think I had "cemetery angels" on my mind. Some people collect photos of them. I've never seen any in real life. I can think of only one statue in the local cemetery, and it's human.

At Windows, on Rooftops
Booyah. One of the really, really old bits of stuff I made up about Eodea is that some cats might be fae in disguise. I have no idea if these two are still the two I made up years ago. They might be just cats.

Reflections
I'd been thinking about what the mirror in SLR cameras would mean for visibility of beings who weren't visible in mirrors.

Birdwatching
Can you tell I got a new camera around this time? I also like birdwatching. And there is a field reserved for the local model aircraft pilots club I pass sometimes when I go for a walk. And my mother was really fond of that pilot chicken I drew at some point.

Memory
Nico is pretty darn old, and not all of that can be waved off with a joke. A bit of Atlan from the Perry Rhodan stories is in there somewhere. The only cathedral I can claim to know is the one in Cologne, which is rather impressive, I think. However, that one is closer to 800 years old.

Cut Roots to Grow
Again with the trying to connect with characters. She is theoretically one of the three I spend most time with, but for various reasons I don't really write much with her in it. (One is that, unlike Nico and Daaren, she has no "usual suspect" to play off of.)

Reassurance
Hell if I know. I'd just like to say that it is one of the first stories I came up with and set aside to write someday. Only took six or seven years...
Come to think of it, the whole werewolf thing for me started with The 10th Kingdom.

Zoned Out
Alien? Bits if Stephen King (Tommyknocker, Dreamcatcher)?
I'm pretty sure mostly caused by me feeling pretty out of it myself at that time. :P

On Sharing One's Feelings
I mentioned elves before, yes? And one of the really big influences I'm under is Elfquest, so some kind of psychic "communication" got included. Rather than the whole "very convenient way to talk at a distance without other people being aware of it", I went with more fuzzy empathy/perception of feelings which most of them cannot suppress. I don't want to take it so far as to make elves a hive-mind, but it certainly messes with ideas of individuality vs group interest, and privacy. Details need hammering out, which is why, this story, for a start.

Loophole
Just wanted to play with the whole frog prince thing a bit. Probably had what I'd heard about the plot of Disney's the Princess and the Frog at the back of my brain.

Identity
This is something that grew out of another story that I lost the nerve to finish and post.
The inspiration at the root of it was Battle Angel Alita. There some cyborgs have more than one body between which they could switch their brain - I think the most obvious example was Jashugan, with the "civilian" and "motorball" models. I basically wondered what technology like that might lead to if it wasn't embedded in a dystopian society shown to us through a story heavily featuring bloodsport and other violence.

Different Definitions
I had the "nobles regarding people serving them as furniture" bit on my mind after re-reading "Winterfair Gifts" by Lois McMaster Bujold, which actually spelled out the "furniture" comparison at some point.
Daaren really doesn't get a mindset like that.

Chaos
(This is a several years old story I posted unedited. Kind of a stopgap, but, hey...)
The whole "elemental sprites" stuff for me started with some fairy-like cratures used for decoration in mood-setting panels in CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth.
I remember that in the first draft of the story, this sprite was blue, because of that one rotating guy from Small Soldiers.

Down a Wrong Path
I had vampires, souls, and mad scientists on my mind because of Gail Carriger's Soulless.
Shadow, well, I like to play with rules, see Reflection. Loss of shadow always reminds me of Peter Pan before anything else. (And book!Peter was bloody creepy, but I'm going off on a tangent here.)

Wishmaking
Both "be careful what you wish for"/magical entities creatively misunderstanding wishes AND "time travel" into the future via magic sleep (or technological cryostasis) are clichés, so honestly I was a bit surprised this got a rather enthusiastic response.
I'm pretty sure the "searching for spirits to get help" bit was inspired by Maegwin from Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books.

Sacrifice
"Gee, it's time to vacuum my room again. But I need a story idea for Friday. Hey, I could write about dustbunnies! Dustbunnies doing WHAT?" Ended up not cleaning, after all...
I think I was introduced to the idea of dustbunnies as characters by the apparently defunct webcomic Catharsis, and/or Irrational Fears, though.
Interesting factoid: In Germany those'd be "dust mice", not bunnies, and in Finland "dust poodles", from what I've been told.

Everybody needs a hobby
I know we have three generations of schoolbooks stashed in various corners, and enough crockery for at least three households. *cough*

Family Values
This is pretty closely based on a dream I had. I reduced the number of people from "a small family gathering" to two, and added the ending, but the rest was all there.