My company owns a set of Little Shop of Horrors puppets which we rent out to different venues. I just called my storage facility to arrange a visit to the plants so I could check for damage before sending them out on the next rental.

They aren’t there.

They were never returned. I’m trying to track them down now and want to reenact some of the bloodier scenes in the play.

I enjoy reading PuppetVision Blog and there’s this post today which makes me think about the commonalities between design and fiction.

I want to scream at my monitor every time I read about someone wanting to do their own take on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, those ideas aren’t new or original and I don’t think people will respond to them because they are not remarkable. If your goal is just to clone what’s already been done (and the mainstream media does that a lot) by all means go ahead. But if your goal is to get attention, have a large audience and be successful you are probably wasting your time.

It’s the same with fiction, isn’t it? I wonder how much of the fiction that seems derivative is actually motivated by a desire to recreate the feeling of wonder which the original created in the reader. You know what I mean, right? “Oh! This books with chainsaws really frightened me. I want to frighten other people like that, so I should put chainsaws in my book!” Which is just looking at the surface. To really emulate these shows or stories we need to look at the roots. “This frightened me.”

Why were you frightened? Now, I think that’s a subtly but importantly different question from “Why did it frighten you.” If you know why you had the reaction then you can think about other things that would provoke the same reaction in you. That’s the thing worth emulating.

Modern Mechanix has posted a fascinating photo from 1934 of miniature skeletons, which are strung like marionettes, and can be posed for artists. How odd.

Our house was built in 1907, so for it’s 100th birthday we are giving it new windows. They just arrived today and the workmen are installing as I type. Yay!