Sometimes a story will come in a brief flash of inspiration. Other times it takes years for the right pieces to materialize and fall into some decent design. This one actually has a bit of both.

The antagonist of this story I dreamed up as a teenager, inspired by a throw-away line in the Aerosmith song, "Don't Get Mad Get Even." Twice I had tried to write a story with him in it, but nothing seemed to stick.

The rest of it didn't hit me until one night when I was taking a steaming hot bath in a Howard Johnsons just outside of New Orleans. It was May, 2005. I had been in the city hanging fliers for one of my websites, hoping to catch the interest of a writer's conference that never materialized.

Reading my travel guide and walking about the French Quarter put me in the mind to write about the city, but I didn't have a story. Then this old bugaboo came slamming back out of his watery grave, and by the time the...

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A fun way to watch an author stutter is to ask, "Where do you get your ideas from?" Well, not today buck-o. This story came to me as my plane was touching down into EWR - Newwark NJ - I had just finished reading an article in the New Yorker (of all places) by Malcolm Gladwell about how the music industry was using computers to take apart past hits, boil them down to their essential parts, compare these bones to the bones in a new piece of music and use statistical analysis to decide whether or not the new song will be a hit before it is released.

Whatever happened to just using your ears?

Anyways, if you have all these old bones laying around and a few supercomputers at your disposal, how hard a leap is it to imagine computers assembling their own Frankenstein pop songs? Listening to recent radio, I would hope it's not too hard. But. What if the computers succeeded beyond everyone's wildest expectations?...

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