Where do I get my ideas, you ask? Maybe you don’t ask that, but I’ll answer anyway, looking at one set of stories in particular.

James T. Smoot’s Cross Time Petting Zoo started out with a conversation I had with a shirt-tail relative. At that time, she was a moderately successful actress, not famous, but able to make a full-time living at it. If you know much about acting, you’ll know isn’t an easy thing to do.

In any case, she worked with a theatre group that made a modest living going to moderate sized towns, putting on a show for a week or two, then moving on. It’s an isolated life, without much time to get to know the locals, so the group becomes its own mostly self-contained world. I thought about what it would be like living in that kind of world and decided that there might be a story in a similar setup. Being a science fiction kind of guy, I wondered how to adapt the idea of a small group making their living wandering from venue to venue so it was science fiction.

A group of actors, I decided, was too mundane. To make it more science fiction, I needed a science fiction element. Fortunately, I had just the universe for a wandering group. My Snapshot universe lets people fly routinely from one alternate reality to another. Perfect, but would the group have to be actors? Maybe not. What about a low-rent traveling zoo wandering between realities with a menagerie of animals, some of them extinct in the real world, some of them never having really existed? I love animals, so I went with that.

Now that I had my universe and the group that was going to fly from reality to reality, I needed to create characters. Since this was going to be me taking a break from more serious novels and having fun, I decided to start out by making as many characters as possible. over-used stereotypes, then gradually, over the course of the stories, keep them true to the stereotypes while rounding them out as much as possible into reasonably well-rounded story people.

James Tiberius Smoot runs the zoo. He’s in it mainly because the animal acts attract young, naive aspiring actresses, some of whom are morally flexible enough that James T rarely sleeps along. Overdone stereotype, the aging, lecherous manager.

 James T has a preteen daughter, Ella. She is aware of her dad’s predatory habits and deeply fearful that one of his playmates will get their hooks into him deeply enough that James T will send her away. She’s precociously knowledgeable about sexual matters in a superficial way due to thin walls and lack of parental discretion and uses that knowledge to embarrass the adults in her life.

Then there is Athena, the stereotypical fiery-tempered red head, who is every bit as hot-tempered as the stereotypes imply, but also a complete and very smart character.

The story needed a tracker, and I had one laying around, Julius Butcher. If you’ve read any of the Snapshot novels you’ll remember his catchphrase: “I can track a mouse across a bare rock.” He’s younger in the James T stories than he is in the later novels and not a Reverend yet, but he’s a genuine Indian tracker. How much more stereotypical can I get?

Finally, most of the stories in all this are told from the point of view of Scott Hardy. Scott is a blue-collar kind of a guy. He cleans the crap out of the animal cages and sometimes works security when the locals try to get too hands-on with the “talent” for the zoo’s animal shows.

Finally, a zoo wouldn’t be complete without animals. The zoo’s stars are a pair of dog-sized, dog-smart fast-running dinosaurs who talk like over-sized parrots. There are other animals too, of course. The zoo has a panda sloth, basically a smallish ground sloth with panda-type markings, a gentle beast that seems to crap out a high multiple of the volume it eats, according to Scott Hardy, who should know because he shovels out the beast’s cage. Then there is the inevitable Thylacine, otherwise known as the Tasmanian Wolf, a dog-like marsupial which in the real world probably died out in the late 1930s but is still around in the fictional world of James T’s zoo.

Once I had all of that, I needed to find interesting places for the zoo to go. So far, they’ve gone to a version of Africa where the dinosaurs never died out and the center of the continent is a vast, mostly unexplored marsh almost too hot for humans to survive, but harboring a hidden city of smugglers and pirates, to an oversized version of Madagascar inhabited mostly by lemurs, those cute little monkey/raccoon things and to island South America, to a mostly-abandoned British colony town deep in the Amazon jungles, where they rent out an elementary school that was hastily abandoned more than a decade ago and get in a bit of urban archaeology as they try to turn it into a viable place for the zoo .

To spice things up, I have the zoo running into surviving Nazis from a reality where they took over Europe and are trying to spread their nonsense to surrounding realities. All three of the James T stories involve Nazi plots of one kind or another, so even my villains are stereotypes.

I had a lot of fun taking this from a stray idea into a series of stories. I don’t play the characters for laughs, though reading back through them I find some lines in the stories and some of the way the characters play off one another very funny. Then again, I have a weird sense of humor.

The James T collection has three stories, a longish short story and two novellas. I put them in chronological order, which, unfortunately puts the weakest story first. The second and third story are both much stronger. I like the last story in the collection best, but it’s close. I think you’ll enjoy both of them, but you’ll see characters maturing and growing a bit more in the third story.

If all of this makes you want to read the James T stories, great. If not, I hope you will take away an understanding that story ideas can come from the oddest of sparks and take a lot of twists and turns before they become full-blown stories.

The Amazon link for the Collection: https://www.amazon.com/James-Smoots-Cross-Time-Petting-ebook/dp/B0CGWQWCYQ/