Story Ideas in the Unlikeliest Places aka What I Found in my Spam Folder

Once again, I’ve been somewhat negligent towards this blog recently. It’s full steam ahead on the editing of Root, and on the writing course I’ve started, but every other bit of writing – and blogging – has flown out of the window.

This morning, though, I just wanted to share something I found in my spam comments list. It’s one of those comments that’s trying to look clever and legitimate, but has either been very badly translated by an online translator, or has perhaps been cobbled together from other comments and then pasted all over the internet.

Pretty component to content. I just stumbled upon your website and in accession capital to say that I get in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Anyway I will be subscribing for your augment or even I achievement you get admission to persistently quickly.

My first reaction was just to laugh at the randomness of it all. My second though, though? ‘Subscribing for your augment’? For me, the word ‘augment’ immediately conjures up images of SF-type advanced humans – perhaps post-humans or cyborgs – with augments being the machine parts added to the human. Add to that ‘subscribe’ and, in this increasingly connected world, I start imagining subscribing to a future cyborg’s augments as casually as we’d subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed today. I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere…

So, from spam comments to SF story ideas. As ever, it pays to be on the lookout for plots wherever you may be, and often in the unlikeliest of places!