Two years ago, I pitched a mini-series to a noteworthy small press comic book publisher. It contained a synopsis and breakdowns for all four issues along with character descriptions, sample script and an attached rising artist. The editor asked to see it, having enjoyed the work I'd been sending in the past as well as being friends with the project's artist. I was quite optimistic that the book was going to get made. I ordered obligatory "comic book rock star" sunglasses and a case of silver and gold signing pens. I began looking into selling the movie rights and complained to people what a hassle it was, being in "the industry."

Of course you know where this is going.

The editor emailed me, informing me that while he loved the idea, the dialogue and the artist, the company was going to pass. It seemed that comic book superstar and Internet cyberpimp Warren Ellis had a project with the company that was almost the exact same concept as mine. But his was in before mine and contracted. He was Warren Ellis. And his had giant robotic penises. Who am I to compete with Warren Ellis and robotic penises? The project gathered dust on my hard drive for another year.

So he really didn't steal it; we simply happened on the same basic idea around the same time, him a bit before me.

A cartoonist pal from Brooklyn got it into his head to revive an obscure DC Comics property languishing in a far corner of the Jack Kirby Wing at 1700 Broadway. Within a year, at least ten other cartoonists stepped forward to place bids on that character, one that hadn't been touched in a decade and eventually the property was slated for overhaul by a DC powerhouse writer/artist team instead. My cartoonist friend returned to doing indy/alt fare amid periodic work for hire projects for Marvel and DC.

Again - same idea; same time.

And so it goes. Stories are born in Creator A's mind. They're molded and shaped into working order. Three months later, Creator B announces the same story at an established publishing house. Creator A returns to the drawing board, pissing and moaning at cruel, cruel fate.

Ideaspace.

A concept superwriter Alan Moore tossed out to an unsuspecting world. It's one of those words that's stuck with me through my career as an observant and struggling writer, just like various coined by the aforementioned Ellis ("headguts", "brainpowered" and "superfast"). The suggested intangible ether in which stories and observations are plucked from molecules, forged into matter and wrestled to the printed page. Ideaspace is where ideas live, breathe and one day, die. Anyone can access Ideaspace, as long as you've got a bit of intelligence, a lot of imagination and a pocketful of organizational sense. And often, in my experience as a writer, more than one creator has accessed many of these ideas at the same time.

It's a bummer, sure. But as a writer you should prepare for this eventuality. One summer I sent six pitches to a publisher and all six were rejected. Three of them, I was told, were already in the works at the company, handled by better-known writers. A friend recently told me that one of his projects was on the desk of an editor at a rising publisher. The EXACT SAME idea was sitting in another proposal on the same desk but created by a more established writer. The editor asked my friend why he should be considered for the job versus the more established writer. In the end, my friend did not get the job.

Two writers, each working independently, come up with the same idea. Does the "losing" writer complain and curse the "winning" writer's good fortune? Maybe for a day or so. Hell, did I bitch and moan about my Ellisian project? Nope - obviously it was a good idea if the publisher was willing to take it from one of us. He was there first, is all (and, you know, Warren Ellis). Back to the well. When my six ideas were rejected, I sent six more. Pick up the pieces, cruise down the Ideaspace highway and hit some roadside attractions.

But some folks don't enjoy the open road. Some folks want the world to come to them.

The most irritating thing I've been asked as a writer, apart from "how much do you make per page" I'd say is "where do you get your ideas?"

Um... the Idea Store?

There's no single place I go to, no book or text that I sit with at my leisure, placing story arc A with ending B to come up with a working, structured story. My stories are inspired by things I've seen in life, concepts near and dear to me like religion, love, history, pop culture and the like. Every now and then a film, song or book will inspire an idea, but odds are my idea isn't an exact copy of what I've just watched, heard or read. It's been renovated, expanded and improved upon on the quick trip through my brain.

There are no Idea "Mad Libs." They're not available in bulk with a package of Character Breakdowns in Aisle Five.

Original ideas are few and dear; like lightning strikes in the middle of the night. Sometimes, as I've said, lightning might strike twice for two completely different people. Which is fine. That's just fine. It's the guy who rushes in, telling everyone that lightning hit HIM when it didn't that I can't stand.

Back at the dawn of the Golden Age, comic book publishers rushed around in the wake of Superman's success, hiring cartoonists who needed quick cash to create "supermen" of their own. If you do a quick search, you can find documented cases of widespread lawsuits against various publishers, claiming that they had stolen National's idea. This wasn't a case of two creators bumping neurons in the wilds of Ideaspace, but rather Creator B stealing Creator A's original idea.

Nowadays there isn't much out and out swiping going on - what with creative corporations employing attorneys as vigilant as the heroes they produce - but you still see ideas being altered and molded into what I'll call "knock-off comics" or "knockcomics." Remember when the TV show Friends first aired? Within one year of its success, audiences were subjected to scores of programs about young, hip twenty-somethings trying to make it in New York (Rest in peace,The Single Guy). What about comics? The Walking Dead is a rousing success, so readers are subjected to fifty-five zombie books on the market. Fables is the flavor of the year, so bring on Lullaby. Vampire book begets vampire book begets vampire book and no one learns anything new.

In the midst of writing this column, I clicked over to Digital Webbing, a "Talent Engine" and supposedly the best online avenue for rising creators to find collaborators and gestate ideas, stories and creations. Heading to the Talent section of the site, I checked to see the kind of projects people are looking to get picked up and published. The following are actual Digital Webbing ads, by writers attempting to create projects:

"I am looking for a dedicated comic book artist to do the art for an 11 page submission that I have created. It is about a zombie Samurai warrior."

"Established and published writer with industry credits has a project ready to go to distribution needs a reliable penciller IMMEDIATELY... This series is a sci-fi/vampire (Blade Runner + Vampire Hunter D style) and I need someone whose style is close to the IDW Metal Gear Solid series or with an anime style."

"Seeking an artist for a proposal for a horror series, about a group of psychics fighting an ancient evil."

"New horror e-zine seeks complete horror short webcomics. This is a non-profit making website so payment is by exposure only. Up to eight pages. All subject considered as long as its horror. Zombies, vampires, werewolves - as long as it causes dread we want it!"

And so on. A parade of vampire/zombie/werewolf/horror knockcomics inspired by writers who actually had a shining epiphany one day while surfing the upper stratosphere of Ideaspace. The other half of the ads was broken into "rogue/government superhero teams" or "manga-style" graphic novels. Seen it read it have it wrote it fuck it.

Where are the original ideas? Where are the jets of ideasperm, waiting to fuse inside the egg that is the creator's mind? Are they gathering dust in aisle ten of the Idea Store, just past the frozen foods? Where, I ask you, does one go to formulate a comic book about a thirteen-year-old homeless girl on a skateboard who patrols a city, fighting "a never ending battle against the forces of evil, nepotism, ninjas, and hunger?" What kind of Zen mindset must one be in to write the adventures of a wisecracking heroic ape with a jetpack and his friend, a man in a lion suit? How did Ellis invent the Bleed, what god did he sell his soul to for concepts like Blitzen Suits and Reality Distortion Fields and why would my eyes explode inwards if I even tried to get a glimpse of it?

I took part in an article about the state of alternative and underground comics in which I said: "People see things like (Craig Thompson's) Blankets selling ten thousand copies and that's what Top Shelf is publishing. And they think 'so if I want to get published, I have to do something like that.'" That's why there are fifty journal comics circulating between the five-six indy/alt publishers, each created and submitted on the basis of the success of James Kochalka. That's why there are so many writers out there creating Authority and 30 Days of Night knockcomics instead of giving life to the next Street Angel or Cerebus, something unique, original and all their own.

Of course some appropriated ideas are not necessarily cookie cutter stories and actually are unique to the individual creator's needs. My book, Ninety Candles, started as a journal comic and then evolved into it's own unique experiment. It's what you do with the idea that matters - where you take it. Ideas based on ideas.

Six Degrees of an Original Idea.

What about you? Have you snatched an idea from the humming ether of Moore's Ideaspace? Perhaps you've been inspired by someone else's vision, their original idea setting off a whole new set of synapses and original thoughts in your own little pocket of Ideaspace? Or do you find it easier to take that original idea and Xerox it, mass-producing someone else's genius under the guise of your own?

What kind of thinker do you want to be - the kind that bitches and moans about the fact that there might just be nothing new under the sun... or the kind that takes six rejections as they come, hitches up your ideapants and builds six new worlds?

Do you want to surf Ideaspace, or would you rather shoplift at the Idea Store?

Where do you get your ideas?

I know where I get mine. Surf's up.

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BIG POND is a collective column that begins with ideas and continues with opinions. Each column focuses in on my musings about writing for the comic book, film and television industry and then gives way to opinions on the week's topic by a diverse group of writers.

This week, we're joined in the pond by Alex DeCampi and Chris Lamb, both of whom have logged more time in Ideaspace than a fifteen year old in an S&M chatroom.

Their thoughts on this week's topic:

Alex: "About a year ago I was in a London taxi and chatting with the cabbie (I love chatting to cab drivers, you learn the most interesting things). When he found out I was a writer, he asked me where I got my ideas. This was surreal. Here he was, a taxi driver, with a million stories coming into his cab every day, and he's asking me where I get my ideas?

"'My characters are my own and my friends' unrealized possibilities," wrote Milan Kundera. That's always summed it up for me. I'm going about my business, and something - a spring flower, confused and blooming in December; how someone turns their head away; a ringing telephone in an empty room - makes me stop and think, "huh". And then I get obsessive, and pick at 'huh', like a scab, until I can pinpoint exactly what disturbed me about that moment. That's where the ladders start. And where they stop, well, you discover that as you climb. Welcome to the great addiction of writing.

"Great ideas come from truth, but there are no truly original ideas. Anyone who thinks they are doing something wholly new has no memory, or is not being honest with themselves. In some ways, we are Ray Bradbury's Wilderness People, constantly retelling the stories we learned as children, while adding elements which make them our own. Bradbury's discussion with Bernard Berenson about how we would remember stories if we had no written words is, quietly, one of the most interesting explorations of the nature of ideas of the past 50 years. So is Cocteau's film ORPHÉE, where the sources of a poet's ideas are presented as crackly radio transmissions, broadcast by the dead, misheard by the living.

"But wait - you came here expecting me to talk about comics. Well, confession time: I don't do much pitching to Marvel and DC. I like reading superhero comics a whole lot, but right now, I have stories I want to tell with my own characters. The opportunities for new writers like me at those companies just don't excite me half as much as what I can do on my own with other publishers. (I'm not going to pimp my stuff here, aside from saying I write comics, please buy them as I have rent to pay.) But I can understand Neil's frustration at putting pitches together to find out that someone with a bigger name has picked the same character out of the shallow, limited pool of revamp possibilities.

"You can always tell the writers whose ideas only come from other comic books in their chosen genre. The ones who only want to play in the same lukewarm, manky pool that the other kids have played (and pissed) in. Then someone like Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis comes along, looks into the pool, frowns in disgust and changes the water. Everyone goes "Oooo!"... for a few brief moments before they go back to arguing about Gwen Stacy. I suppose that's what we should all aim for: to write the stories that change the water. And where do ideas come from? Everywhere."

Chris: "Let's you and me talk about the weather, huh?

"Li Ruqing sits by a missile launcher loaded down with chemical-tipped warheads, just watching the sky. He commands three such batteries in the North Western corner of Beijing, keeping an eye on the weather report and a cool hand on the trigger. The weather's a bitch in this part of China, holding back rain the crops desperately need in favor of hail stones that beat anything edible or old and pretty-looking into pulp. Li isn't waiting for enemy airplanes. When the storm clouds roll in, he's going to shoot great fucking holes through them with the precision and tactical mind of a seasoned field commander. The shells seed the clouds, forcing the moisture inside to fall before it can form hail or decide to just stay up in the air in that smug fashion precipitation has. Li's a cloud shooter, and goddamn if that isn't the best job title ever.

"Somewhere in interview form, either on the internets or quaintly marked down on paper in ink, Alan Moore talks about ideaspace as an actual location, complete with weather patterns and environments. Contextual lightning strikes this pro writer in Portland and this girl in Richmond, and you've got a race on your hands. File-swapper Napster was conceived and programmed in something like three days by that kid in a Metallica shirt who later said the frantic pace was necessary because he knew 'somebody else out there had the same idea and was working on it too.' And he was right. That time around, he won Thunderdome-for-brains and got to be the guy everyone else ripped off. He was also the guy everybody sued into a crippled, hollow tool, but that's hardly the point.

"Neil's already talked about the trials of being second to market, I won't bother. Instead I'm going to talk about ideaspace as weather, as clouds passing over and heavy with potential, and the art hitting them with things to produce results.

"I've done the writer's group thing. I've heard guest speakers by the dozen, wasted time - time I could have spent, y'know, WRITING - listening to shell-shocked self publishers describe the horrors of the publishing and what to do when Oprah doesn't want your very moving account of your son's battle with webbed toes. But mostly, I've seen easily fifty men and women get asked the same question: 'Where do you get your ideas?' And I swear to God, if I have to hear one more cute answer involving letters from a mysterious address in Colorado, telepathic messages from a pet bird or an old family well hidden in the mountains of Tennessee, I'm going to break something. Many things. People-shaped things. You want to know where ideas come from? Fine. Here then, for you and your loved ones, for the world and generations as yet to be born, is where I Get My Ideas:

"Things coming together. Bits of this rub off on some that and, like atomic compounds, something new is born. I don't know ideaspace meteorology, how the water cycle or wind currents work in regards to information being shuffled around the world. I know dark-bottomed clouds passing over and the desperate frustration of not feeling a single drop on my head. I know picking up books by Best Selling Author Man and seeing that passing notion I had a few months ago and didn't bother with raking in tall literary dollars from some other shmuck. I know clouds don't give up anything until they're heavy, until there's something to rain down. And that rather than waiting for chance to happen to drop a fully realized Great American Novel in my head, maybe I should be cloud shooting to see what shakes out.

"Input is ammunition is everything. I walk through New York City and look up, look all around, look like a tourist and don't care because there's just so much to take in and disassemble for later use. My bondphone is full of bits of conversation overheard, of graphitti on trains and people shuffling across the street. It's all useful. There's a stack of unread books in the corner of my room to see me through the end of March with subjects ranging from the short fiction to Joe Strummer's politics to the drinking habits of famous writers gone by the Kerouac picking my neighborhood apart like it was made of Lego. DVDS I need to watch that just bleed beauty and new out of the box. A stack of comic singles picked up because they look pretty and thank-you-Lord different. CDs bought because I liked the titles on the back and want to see if the song matched up. What sort of song are you going to write to match a title like 'Jet Ski Accidents' or 'Cue The Strings?' Just tell me please because I need to know. Every line, every dream sequence or refrain is more seed for the clouds, more bumper cars to smash around in my headmeats and give me something new to talk about.

"Writing isn't waiting around. You want inspiration, that hook your story's going to dig in to the minds of submission editors and audiences with, you're going to have to knock it out of the sky yourself. Sky shooting and rain in Beijing. Bits of the world around you knocked in to each other and stories that make your hands shake just trying to get them down. It isn't hard. And it starts when you close you this page and step outside, ears open and eyes wide."

The column doesn't end there, though - head on over to the The Big Pond forum at the Scryptic Forums and add your opinion to the Pond! Join the collective column and talk writing with myself, this week's contributors and the rest of the Scryptic writers.

My thanks to Alex and Chris for agreeing to jump in to the Pond this week - keep your eyes open for more of their work. Or else.

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Neil Kleid won the Xeric grant for NINETY CANDLES, an experimental graphic novella, and his first graphic novel, BROWNSVILLE, (with artist Jake Allen) debuts from NBM Publishing in 2005. A graphic designer by day, Neil harbors notions of writing full time. Weep for him.

Alex DeCampi writes comics and screenplays. In May, her noir miniseries SMOKE (drawn by Igor Kordey) debuts from IDW. Her modernization of Goethe's FAUST, fully painted by Seb Camagajevac, will come out late in the year. She also co-edits the 'zine COMMERCIAL SUICIDE and is currently working on DEFECTIVE COMICS, a self-published digest of her shorter stories. Meanwhile, she has been commissioned to write a supernatural thriller by Chocolate Chilli Films, an independent UK producer.

Chris Lamb, lives and writes in New York City. All of it. At the same time. He currently freelances for VAMPIRELLA MAGAZINE, and no, will not give you the home numbers of any of the models. So stop asking, huh?