Freedom of the whim.

It's amazing how often my stories, and some of my better stories at that, start out in jest, a whim, a response to something I just heard or read.

"Tuskers" came from a friend moving to Arizona and having javilinas tear up his yard and chase his dog and other shenanigans. I visualized a retired guy standing on a pile of pig bodies swinging a baseball bat like Conan the Barbarian.

"FREE MARS!"came from reading about child slave colonies on Mars. If ever there was a Heinleinesque science fiction adventure story...

What usually happens is that I write a quick little story, but the story just keeps going and going and before I know it, it's become a thing.

Because they start as throwaways, not really serious, I'm pretty much free to write what I want, and because of that idea that nothing is going to come of it, I think the writing is actually better than when I try to be serious and bare down.

The purity of it, the telling the story just to tell the story, is what makes it good. Which is pretty ironic, you know. Because most often they aren't commercial ideas, and so it don't matter in the least whether they are any good in their own right.

I never really understood the idea of "sell-out" but I'm kind of running into real world examples of it. Personally, I think its a silly idea. Writing to sell just means you're writing things people want to read and there is nothing wrong with that.

But sometimes I just want to write what I want to write, and that doesn't mean it will be something anyone else is interested in.

It hurts my brain to think about whether an idea is commercially viable.

Basically, it isn't relevant.