I usually get my ideas from snippets of everyday life that merge to form an idea.  One I’ll share with you kind of evolved this way.

– Terrorist attacks are relatively common in public places in various parts of the world

– I fear it’s only a matter of time before that horror arrives on our (US) shores (I pray every day that I’m wrong; not because I want terrorist attacks where they’re happening — I want them to stop everywhere)

– One thing airlines (or, today, TSA) checks before people board an airliner is electronic devices to make sure they’re just electronic devices (boot the laptop, etc)

– When I was hanging out in a coffee shop, I saw lots of people who just left their stuff at their table and would step outside for several minutes at a time — usually for cell phone calls

– It strikes me that it would be relatively easy to rig an old laptop to appear to go through a boot routine (we had one years ago that would run a .bat file on startup that pretended to wipe the hard drive — it was  a joke, and did get a few people going), but in reality, this laptop would look like it was booting up but would start a timer that, after a specified period of time, would set off an explosive device enclosed in the laptop case.

– What if someone had a reason to want to do this?  They could rig these things up, travel around the country, appear to set themselves up for some work  in a busy coffee shop — laptop, steaming cup of coffee, and a pastry — but when they were ready, they’d start the laptop up, while it was booting, they’d grab their phone and step outside as if to take or make a phone call, but instead of doing that, they’d slip away and leave the area.  Three to five minutes later, the laptop would explode.  Maybe it hurts someone, maybe it doesn’t, but if this began happening in enough different coffee shops, it would become disruptive.

-Did I mention the DC Sniper case?  Remember them?  What got them in trouble was they spent too much time in one place.  Before they concentrated on the DC Beltway area, they’d done similar things in various places around the nation that people only began putting the pieces together after they’d been caught.

So, I have a character who wants to disrupt life as we know it.  She travels a lot.  What was her motivation?  She had hippy grandparents who were activists in the 60s and lived in a commune.  Her mother, the grandparents’ daughter, grew up in the commune, rejected that lifestyle, and was very straight-laced and opposed most of what her grandparents stood for.  As things sometimes happen, the granddaugher idolized her grandparents.  The mother avoided her parents whenever possible, but she died when the girl was young.  The girl’s father, who idolized his wife, fell apart.  He managed to hold down his job, but that was about it.  The girl, even though she had a father, was left to fend for herself and, to some extent, take care of the household.  Her father would sometimes send her to Maine for part of the summer to her grandparents.  During one of those summers, he committed suicide.  The grandparents kept and raised the granddaughter.

So, where did all this come from?  I’m interested in generational differences among people.  So many people thing parents have complete control and responsibility for their children’s behavior, yet we see example after example of this not being the case. Time and again, we see examples of complete irresponsible parents having kids who essentially take care of the parent.  We see straight-laced, thoroughly involved parents whose kids are complete terrors.  And we see everything along the spectrum between an opposite of what I just mentioned.  There are 7- year-olds who run a household while the supposedly responsible parents party and spend most of their time drugged up.  There are some contrasts in the family described above, but they aren’t too far-retched.

Right now, this idea is still in limbo.  I called it Hot Coffee for my 2006 National Novel Writing Month effort.  I’m still not coming up with a reasonable story.  The main character’s motivation for blowing up free Wi-Fi hotspots was the coffee shop’s employment of site blocking software, but that seems pretty lame.  On the other hand, people have done equally bad things for equally lame ideas.  That’s real life, and we’re talking fiction here.

Where did the site blocking software idea come from?  I was in a coffee shop and searched on a perfectly respectable item, but, because it was associated with firearms, the coffee shop had blocked it.

No.  I won’t be blowing up any coffee shops — or anything else — out of frustration over that insignificant moment in my life, but one of my characters might.  Someday.  If I can figure out how to make it compelling enough.

Today’s post was inspired by the topic “Where I Got My Latest Idea” the next topic on the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour, an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. We have all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

If you want to get to know nearly twenty other writers, check out the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour.  For tomorrow’s post, check out LC Aisling at If Writing Was Child’s Play…