Do you ever think about literary mash-ups? Charles Strauss just published The Jennifer Morgue, a book that combined the horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the James Bond spy mythos.
Think about the possibilities! I think we spend so much time polishing our words to create something new that we end up forgetting how fun it is to play. Go ahead and play with characters, books, and movies that you've loved since you were a kid.
Thanks to John Scalzi and Boingboing for the link. Scalzi has written a stack of non-fiction books, including the sci-fi novel, Old Man's War I love his funny and personal blog for American Online, because he introduces me to creative, wacky thinkers like Charles Stross--a novelist elevating the mash-up to an art form.
"[T]o take the works of two well-loved writers, add Magic Ingredient X (a cynical twenty-something hacker who is utterly unlike any character who might have featured in said writers' work, or even in their world-view), and then remix the hell out of them. It turns out that this is a pretty good recipe for getting something original out of the far end of the process -- the lack of slashdot-reading geeks in Lovecraft, for example, enables you to probe the mythos and come up with something new -- but working through the consequences is pretty demanding."
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