Ten Thousand Years of Spotted Trolls

I woke up last night with a great story idea in my head. I wrote it down on the note pad I keep by my bed for exactly those types of moments. Then I went back to sleep, confident that I had secured the nugget that would lead to a great story. When I woke up this morning, I picked up the pad and read:

“10,000 YEARS OF SPOTTED TROLLS…”

Now where am I supposed to go with that??? I can’t remember the dream; I can’t even remember the thought process that put brought the idea to mind. I just woke up, wrote something (barely legible) down, and went back to sleep. 

What makes this even weirder is that the day before yesterday Walter Jon Williams did a Big Idea write-up on Whatever about his new book, Implied Spaces. In that BI post, he notes that he once woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down “UFOs ARE REALLY MADE OF BREAD,” and awakened the next morning just as oblivious as I was today. Did he somehow plant a subliminal suggestion in my mind to make me wake up and write something incomprehensible on my note pad, which otherwise has given me some pretty good ideas? He must have. There is absolutely no other plausible explanation for it. My mind has been invaded by WJW. So now I’m headed out to find his new book so I can buy it, and then I’ve got to stop by a tattoo parlor and have WJW scripted onto my newly-naked skull skin.

Photo: Troll sculpture by Kim Graham