A few Weird Places a Writer’s Ideas Come from

When someone asks, “Where do you get your ideas?” the best answer is probably … “Everywhere.” Any little thing you notice can become the seed of a character, plot point, setting, or just a line of dialogue. Here are a few recent ones that worked for me.

I’ve never tried ChatGPT, but I’ve messed around with AI art generators to see what they crank out. Sometimes it helps me get a clearer idea of what one of my characters looks like, sometimes a resulting image looks enough like what I’ve had in mind that I can point to it and, if I’m ever able to commission an actual artist someday, say, “That’s more or less what this guy looks like. Except maybe tweak this detail or that.”

And sometimes it’ll miss the mark by twelve parsecs, but at the same time it, and a conversation about it, will generate ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Couple weeks ago I tried to get one of these tools to make an image of a character from Freelancers, just for the hell of it. I commissioned a drawing of her somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, when I actually had some money to spare for such things, and it ended up being so close to what I’d had in mind that I had a clear picture of her from that moment on.

So, just for the hell of it, I tried typing a description of her into one of the generators I’ve had the most luck with, Playground AI. I went through most of the different art styles while keeping the same description each time, and every result was … not even close to what Chula actually looks like.

Most of them were pretty damn cool, though. I showed them to a friend that I do a lot of brainstorming with, and he said the images had the vibe of a super-badass order of warrior-nuns: “So I am totally getting this order of Space Nuns, but like the sort that don’t have time for the nonsense of normal authorities. Like, they are a bunch of social workers that decided to go out and become like… the Space Rangers or something, but all former nuns, except they aren’t necessarily celibate or anything either. Like, basically they were all trained to be badass Jesuit mercs, decided they didn’t like the atmosphere, fought their way out, founded an order, and nobody has the guts to go against them.”

And a light bulb appeared above my head.

The images had already given me ideas for a few characters, and even alien species, to use in the background. Like, characters the protagonists of Uncharted Territory can encounter once they’ve ventured outside of known space in the sequels. But it really took off during this conversation.

At first, the idea reminded me of the Qowat Milat, but without the cultural thing of attaching themselves to “lost causes.” I also liked the idea of them being nuns but disliking the atmosphere … and the restrictions. “It could’ve been a worse life, but they were always so serious! Just no sense of humor at all. Really cramped our style, y’know?”

It also reminded me of an idea I’d had a really long-ass time ago. Like, thirty years or more. And I’d almost forgotten about it until this jogged my memory. Had this idea of a branch-off of a religious order who’d decided that the true path to enlightenment was to experience everything life had to offer, instead of forbidding its adherents from doing anything the average person takes for granted. One of their core tenets is to try something new every day. Except, of course, things that would harm someone.

Both of these ideas merged in my head. The sequel to Uncharted Territory will follow an expedition into the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way, which — as far as anyone in the known galaxy is aware — has never been explored. So this order of warrior-nuns could be one of the things the expedition encounters. I’m thinking it isn’t just one alien species, but an order that was established centuries ago and welcomes anyone who wants to join, so it’ll be quite a collection of individuals. When they meet the expedition, a handful of them splits off to join the fleet just for a new experience, offering their services as extra protection on scouting missions, search and rescue operations, and whatnot, in exchange for housing on one of the ships.

My friend’s next comment was, “Yeah I could totally see them being badass mercs with a conscience. And also the shock of when they get into drunken revelries, lol.” And that kicked off another burst of ideas.

I had this idea of one of the warrior-nuns fending off a pirate attack on some remote outpost or a space station or whatever. The whole group is surrounded by enemy troops and huddled under whatever cover they could find, and she just casually announces that she’s going to go out there and fuck their shit up.

Someone says, “You can’t possibly kill all of them!”

She just flicks an annoyed glance at him and grumbles, “I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.” She then marches out to meet the pirates and whacks one after another until the survivors run like hell. She returns and says, “You can relax. I took care of their leader and the rest just scattered.”

One of the people she’s protecting raises an eyebrow. “Took care of him? As in …?”

“Eh.” She gestures vaguely over her shoulder. “I think his head landed somewhere over there. I dunno, I didn’t really keep track of it after it separated from his neck.”

“I… I’m gonna have nightmares for the rest of my life now.”

“Pffft. Killjoy.”

Someone else says, “Is it weird that that kinda turns me on?”

“That’s more like it! Meet you in the bar when we get back to the fleet?”

The bit about drunken revelries gave me another idea. I instantly had this image of another of the warrior-nuns getting into a chugging contest after the party has been in full swing for a while. She and her opponent go ten or twelve rounds before he starts having trouble sitting up straight and keeping his eyes from crossing. Two more drinks are poured and placed in front of each of them. He stares at his cup with increasing dread.

The nun pounds her shot, looks at him for a moment, then she reaches over, steals his shot, and fuckin’ chugs it, too! Then she just smirks at him until his eyes roll up in his head and he slumps over and sort of drips out of his chair.

And once again, the reply from my friend kicked off another creative spurt: “Also all the puns when one of them comes across a good date, I’m picturing a Captain Malcolm from Firefly sort of figure, snarky but respectful in his core, and the banter such a union would produce, lol.”

Cue my brain cranking out multiple paragraphs …

I figured all kinds of fun could be had from the nuns just talking with people. I suddenly imagined the Mal-like character just hanging out with his date in a bar while she’s talking with a couple other nuns. The other two are talking about recent dates they’ve had and he overhears one of them laugh and say, “I made her come so hard, she couldn’t even remember where she was for about ten minutes.”

Mal chokes on his drink and some of it squirts out of his nose. His date pats him on the back and laughs.

“You okay?”

“Wow, this stuff burns when it gets into the nasal passages.”

“Well, yeah, it’s not meant to go up that pipe.”

The other nun leans over and stares at him. “Is it normal for human faces to turn that shade of red?”

“Well, it’s just … I mean … you’re nuns! I know, I know, you’re not the typical … but you dress so much like them …”

“Only when we’re off-duty.” His date fires off a shit-eating grin. “And I wasn’t dressed like this last night.”

“Y-yeah, but, I mean … uh … sorry, I’m still trying to get my head around all this.”

The other nun says, “Yeah, that’s why our order split off from the main one. They insisted on remaining celibate and all that crap. I’d never be able to tolerate that. Having all those impure thoughts distracting you during combat because you’re not even allowed to let them into your head any other time — that shit can get you killed real fast.”

“Exactly, Sister! If you know there’s a fight ahead of you, I figure it’s always a good idea to get laid first. Or at least masturbate. Then you can go into battle with a clear head.”

“Hey, your face was almost back to normal, but now it’s turning red again. Is that a reaction to something or does human skin just pulsate really slowly?”

Mal just slouches in his chair and covers his face with his hands. His date smirks and chugs another drink.

“Well, sometimes a girl just needs to rub one out.”

“Oh … my … god. Now I’m having impure thoughts.”

“Good! That’s the best kind!”

😆

By the way, as an experiment, I typed the prompt, “alien warrior nun” into the tool just to see what it did. Didn’t add any other description. Most of the images it cranked out were … wild. But they gave me ideas for more alien characters/species. Some of them will probably be among the Space Nuns discussed above.

Anyhoo. I know these AI tools are controversial, but I’ve found this one valuable for the ideas I get just from looking at some of the images.

As for other idea-generating places, the Spacedock channel on YouTube is quite inspirational for propulsion systems, weapons, and other spacecraft-related stuff. For one instance, I had already planned on one of the protagonists of Uncharted Territory to acquire her own ship after the expedition launches at the end of the book. The character, Kolya Mason, who was inspired by Helena Pierce in Borderlands, has a massively scarred face as part of her backstory, and after surviving the injuries from an explosion years earlier, she became an adventurer. She spent nearly a decade hitchhiking on starships just for the opportunity to see as much of the galaxy as possible. She knows how unlikely it was to survive that explosion, so she felt like she got a second chance that most people don’t, and she didn’t want to waste it.

And I know I’ve brought this up before, but I’ll say it again — Helena got shafted by Borderlands 2. She’d been put through enough already, and then she kinda got fridged just to make the main villain that much easier to hate. I say “kinda” because Helena wasn’t the loved one of a main character, but I still feel like it applies. It happened just to show how horrible the villain was. And it’s a shame because imagine a character like her as the protagonist of a video game. She could’ve been iconic. And it would’ve made a nice little “fuck you” to the YouTube talking heads who throw a tantrum every time they see a female character in a game who isn’t “hot” enough for them to crank one out to. Which is one of the main reasons I decided to give Kolya the kind of background she has …

By the way, I still wasn’t quite satisfied with the image of Kolya that I got by using the character creator in Fallout 4. I’d already started over from scratch several times and got close, but it wasn’t quite right. So I tried it one last time a few weeks ago. Couldn’t pick different colors for the eyes, so I had to take a screenshot with one color and another screenshot of a different color, then copy one eye from one shot and paste it over the eye in the other, to show that her left eye was also damaged by that shuttle fuel-cell explosion.

Still don’t think I got the hair quite right. I imagined it being a slightly lighter brown, but the lighter shades in the character creator didn’t look right, so I left it where it was. Also, the hairstyle isn’t quite there. But at least the scars are as gnarly as I’d imagined them. Also, there’s a bit of business late in Uncharted Territory when the protagonists decide to alter their appearances so they’d be less recognizable, since one of the reasons they joined the expedition is to get away from a crime syndicate that’s hunting them. Kolya changes her hair to blond and gets a number of cybernetic mods, including both eyes and a set of nano-LED threads implanted in her scars.

In addition to her new eyes being able to see the whole electromagnetic spectrum rather than just what’s visible to humans, they — and the light strips in her scars — can change colors and even display animated effects like the backlighting on a Razer keyboard. One of the effects is “ice” and another is “lava” and another is “fire.” So she’ll look like she’s got fire — or lava, or whatever — dancing inside her skull. Someone she had a conversation with in an earlier chapter suggested she “steer into the skid” and have a little fun with the scars, and she decided, “Sure, why not?”

I tried to get a good image of Kolya’s new look with the AI-art tool, but one of its shortcomings is that it absolutely refuses to put scars on female characters unless it just happens randomly. And when it actually does what it’s told, the scars are either in the wrong location or on both sides of her face. And when trying to get the fire effect for her eyes and scars, it insisted on adding flames to her clothes and even in the background. This image was the closest I could get. So just imagine that kind of effect on the scars in the image I got using Fallout 4 …

Anyway. What the hell was I talking about earlier? Oh, right … Kolya’s new ship.

One of Spacedock’s videos gave me a couple of ideas on how she gets her hands on it. The Starfield Direct deep-dive from a couple of months ago also helped all of this click into place in my head. The Starfield one in particular sparked some ideas for pirate activity that the characters might have to deal with.

As much as I absolutely despise thieves, having been a victim of them too many times, I could never go the piracy route, even as a role-play. (Though I suppose one of the dev-team members talking about boarding people’s ships and stealing their sandwiches was kind of funny. When I saw the pile of them covering a workbench, the first thought that crossed my mind was, Shouldn’t those be refrigerated?) But the bit in the above video about being able to board someone’s ship, take it from them, and add it to your fleet was another “light bulb” moment for me.

So I’m thinking … a pirate ship approaches the main characters and they quickly decide not to put up a fight because of the enemy ship’s armaments. It’s just a scout-sized ship with a small crew, but one of its weapons systems was inspired by this Spacedock video.

Guns that shoot pellets the size of grains of sand along an ion stream is just cool. And using slightly larger projectiles that can be hollowed out and filled with fissile materials is even cooler … and terrifying. They’d impact with enough force to initiate fission, and hundreds or even thousands of them can be fired in a single burst. So, yeah, our heroes surrender because they don’t want to be on the receiving end of that.

I’m thinking what happens next is, the pirate ship docks with theirs and several pirates board … and our crew fights them off, forces their way onto the pirate ship, and takes the rest of them down. Since our heroes aren’t murderers, they make the pirates put on their own spacesuits and then shove them out the airlock and alert the local police. The pirates will then float around with plenty of time to think about the decisions that have led them to this point before the fuzz finds them.

Kolya takes over the pirate ship, rechristens it the SS Helena Handbasket, and will use it as an advanced scout in the upcoming exploration mission. And, who knows, maybe this’ll be the last they’ve heard of those pirates … or maybe the crew has just made another new enemy.

So. Probably should wrap this up here so I won’t keep bloviating. I just find it intriguing how so much can come from simply looking at some images and a couple of videos …