(no subject)

Yesterday, while trying to rewrite a story-- and why can't I keep my genderbent clockwork love story with ballet in shorter than 6k words!?-- I started looking at seahorses and the keeping thereof, and sighed sadly at how difficult it was and how incompetent I am. I mean, I can barely deal with my freshwater tank and here are people feeding their seahorses newly hatched brine shrimp several times a day!

Suddenly I had an idea: mermaids in aquariums. How hard would that be? I could write that, and vent all my spleen about equipment/livestock troubles and all the arguments I watched about conservation/responsibility/invasive species (we can fish various cichlids out of the canals here in South Florida because people dump pets). And you know people would want them, because people will put anything they can fit into their aquarium-- just check out Monster Fish Keepers.

I love natural history kind of things and I really love talking about the pros/cons of different species in captivity and I relish the opportunity to bring in all the weird nature trivia taking up otherwise useful space in my brain.

It allowed me to write things like this:

S. suvannamaccha was famous for its delicate constitution, much shyer than the estuary-dwelling S. andersonii that you usually saw overwhelming its owners. Andersonii were docile enough that captive-bred individuals would forego their siren song if properly fed. Big, but not otherwise hard to keep: Dick would live off pizza and beer if we let him.

This, plus an opening sequence involving a sign to the mermaid sanctuary that says "trespassers will be shot and/or eaten" means that I've fallen in love with this throwaway character and could easily write a YA romance between Dick the Mermaid and the unnamed protagonist. Because another book idea is exactly what I need right now. Exactly.