The Fredösphere

Story tellers search continually for fresh ideas for their stories.  Always looking for some new deposit to mine.  The creators of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo found some gold, and started digging:

In the year "3001.5," the world is controlled by the "Chrome Dome Empire" under Csar Baldy Bald the 4th, who has launched the EMBB Edict: Everybody Must Be Bald. To that end, he's sent out his Hair Hunters, soldiers who reduce the populace to skinheads, regardless of gender or age. But when a young pink-haired girl named Beauty is threatened by the Hair Hunters, a tall, improbably muscled man with a humongous blond afro appears and rescues her.

Using his nose hair as a weapon. And harnessing his martial art "Snot For-You."

Another well-worn tool for breaking writer's block is the random word generator.  Here's a passage from Peter and the Wolf given the Crazy Lib treatment:

Early one fortnight, Lawrence opened the gate and went out to the big orange valley. On a branch of a big popsicle sat an unconventional cat, Lawrence's mother. "All is short, all is short!", chirped the cat roughly. Yes, all is short. Just then a squirrel came conceding round. She was glad Lawrence hadn't groped the turkey baster and decided to take a nice swim in the deep skerry in the valley.

Story tellers would do well to heed the submission guidelines for Escape Pod, a podcast of new sci-fi and fantasy stories:

EP is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for science fiction and fantasy. Please don’t send us anything that doesn’t fit those descriptions. And by the way, we mean SF/F on a level that matters to the plot. Your story about a little boy receiving a balloon before his heart transplant may be touching literature, but it probably isn’t something we’re interested in, even if you edit it so that the balloon’s an alien and the heart came from Satan.

Reminds me of my idea for the theoretical ultimate in soft sci-fi:  if one of Jane Austen's novels contained a space alien as a minor character.

Labels: Creativity, sci-fi