Bolt From The Blue Dept.

I love being hit by lightning.

See, I didn't go to Otakon for inspiration. The inspiration stork drops idea babies quite regularly into my house. I have notebooks full of unused ideas, just waiting for me to pick through them like one kid trying to make his way through a whole city block's worth of candy stores.

But that's the funny thing about inspiration: you don't always ask for it. Sometimes it just drops in. Sometimes it parks itself on your couch, smokes your stash, swills down that bottle of Taittinger's you had stowed away for someone's graduation, and runs up a massive phone bill.

(OK, enough extended metaphors. I promise.)

I spent most of Otakon — from about Friday afternoon on through Sunday — with a new idea for a future book. Quite possibly my next book. Also quite possibly the culmination of several parallel ideas that for a long time had obstinately refused to sit down together in the same room. I spent most every spare moment I had scribbling down this idea — that is, when I wasn't editing my convention reports or running from Hither to Thither (average distance: 1500 feet) or interviewing people in fifteen-minute blocks or just lying on my back and blowing out shallow breaths and wondering what the hell I'd just done to my ankles.

And the more I scribbled, the more I said, I have something here. It became all the clearer that I had something when I explained the idea to three people on three separate occasions — to my friend Jeremy over dinner one night, to my other friend Daniel over breakfast on Sunday, and to my friend Mike on the phone while driving back. (The gods were smiling; I only ran out of both signal and battery power after I'd already blown his mind and had to stop for gas.) Talking about it with all three of them helped nail it down all the more, helped prune away some of the corners on which people might be likely to snag elbows and pants cuffs.

You have no idea how tempted I am to spill it all here.

Just not right now. And there are two reasons for this.

One, the whole thing is still very much Under Wraps. I could end up with something radically unalike what I told my friends about, and the fewer people I tell one thing and deliver another, the less like a prospective bait-and-switch artist I'll feel. (This is, I know, highly irrational, but as Andrei Codrescu once said, the Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans. Meaning, I guess, that nobody expects this stuff to make sense. It behaves as it behaves.)

Reason Numéro Deux is a little trickier. I'd rather not talk about the idea here because one of the things I'm considering is a sort of viral-marketing campaign, which relies on prior secrecy to make it that much more interesting. I might find the whole project a bit much to handle — it's all still in the "yeah, that sounds like it might work here, but I have to see if it kills me" stages — but why pre-emptively shoot myself in the foot?

I am willing to mention a few things which are not spoilers, and which for all I know might light a fire under peoples' curiosities all the more. So here goes.

1. This is not a "Japan project" like Summerworld or Tokyo Inferno or Vajra or what have you. It takes place in an almost entirely synthetic and futuristic setting. Japan has almost nothing to do with it at all, so that way I cannot be accused of wantonly repeating myself and getting all boring and repetitive.
2. Back when something akin to this project was being considered, I had two working titles for it. One was Escape Maneuvers; the other was Sideways. The first title was terrible and the second one was eaten alive by a movie that I love quite a bit and would never be able to steal even 1% of the thunder from. So I have a new title for it.
3. The story started with the new title, in fact.
4. No, I am not telling you what it is yet, and if anyone who knows what it is posts it as a comment or otherwise ruins the fun you will wake up with your car mummified in toilet paper.
5. Another major impetus for the project, as strange as this sounds, was to take a couple of things that were catchy and snappy — a cool title, some catchphrases that look good on a shirt — and wrap a good, deep, engaging story around them. I know that sounds bizarre, but let's face it — if I'm doing this gig entirely on my own, I've got to become that much more savvy a marketer and self-promoter.
6. You will find out what those catchphrases and such are later on, too.
7. If you already know what they are, see #4. I have a lot of toilet paper handy.
8. If this was a movie I'd want Paul Oakenfold to do the soundtrack.

No, I don't expect anyone to get that last part, but it was fun putting it in there.