L is for Lair of the Lawyer

For the A to Z challenge this year, I’m sharing science fiction and fantasy story ideas…

I don’t have much more than this phrase for L: “Lair of the Lawyer.” A lot of the ideas that I’ve posted so far I made up with some free association and looking at words that were on my Holly Lisle ‘Sweet Spot Map’. For L, I saw the lair and ‘lawyered’ (as in the HIMYM catchphrase,) but just thought of the phrase ‘Lair of the Lawyer.’ And then, in my A-Z ideas file, I added “I’m not sure what I can make from this.”

So, where is the lair of the lawyer? Some lonely cave, or a fancy condo on the top floor of a skyscraper? Is he a scoundrel willing to twist the law for the sake of whoever will pay his bills, or a misunderstood man with a good heart?

If you’re interested enough to pick this up and write your own version, feel free; ideas are cheap. And let me know! I’ll be keeping the notions vague enough that lots of different stories might be written from them.

Thanks for visiting!

How to Draw your SSM

No, not that SSM. After a few false starts, I’m finally making progress on my new Holly Lisle ‘How to Think Sideways’ lessons. I asked my family for this course for Christmas, and my sister’s side came through, paying for my first eight lessons! Thanks, sis.

I remember I took a stab at lesson one back in February sometime, downloading the worksheets before going off to Williams for a write-in with Elizabeth and Nixy, and I got through at least one exercise that day, the shadow room, which is a lot of fun. I think I did my first visual clustering exercise back in February, or maybe squeezed it into May when I was sick and tired of editing. But my attempts to get some Thinking Sideways done during April were completely squeezed out by Camp Nano. (Getting to 50k in a month is never as easy as I think it’ll be.)

But I’ve been going a little gangbusters on HTTS since May started, finishing lesson 1 in a few days, (where you’re introduced to four fearsome villains of the mind: Safe, Perfect, Victim, and Feel–doing battle with each in an introductory exercise.) On Sunday afternoon,  I touched based with Elizabeth about her own experiences with the first few lessons in the course, and read through lesson 2. The next day, I started the lesson 2 homework: a giant six-page cluster of free association that Holly calls a Sweet Spot Map, or SSM for short.

My first SSM is almost complete now. There’s a starting ‘node’ on each of the pages: Things I love, things I fear, things that make me shiver, and so on. From these six starting places, you just let your brain free-wheel and draw your own things to connect, creating a big cluster of things, names, and concepts that make sense in your own inscrutable brain. It’s a lot of fun.

I’m not quite sure what I do with this map now. That’s in lesson 3. 🙂