Part 1 of ?

I can't really think of anything right now, so I'm going to post the first bit of a short story I've been working on since December of 2006 or January 2007 or so. I don't write on it too often, so it's far from complete, but feel free to leave constructive criticism.

/Story on
People ask me where I get my ideas. Some writers won’t tell you, others will lie. Some will say that they get their ideas from the news, or, in the manner of William Shakespeare himself, they take tried and true ideas and change them just enough to seem new. Neil Gaiman once told the story of Erasmus Fry, a writer who traveled to Greece and captured a muse. Calliope, her name was. For the next fifty years, he kept her locked in a room in his basement, and raped her regularly. This is where his ideas came from. He eventually sold his personal muse to another struggling writer for a ball of hair, covered in saliva, that had been extracted from the stomach of an obsessive-compulsive woman. A bezoar, thought to protect the bearer from all forms of poison. But I digress. Calliope, the muse, was then passed to a new master, who treated her much the same, before one day, she escaped with the help of a former lover and father of her child. Seems far fetched, but in reality, it is less so than you might think.
So, where do writers get their ideas from? Why do you ask me? I’m not a writer, I’m a storyteller. I’ll tell you where storytellers get their ideas from if you want. I hunt mine. With a spear. While dressed in a loincloth. I have the scars to prove it, for some ideas have larger teeth than others.
I used to do it the same as every other writer: scan the news, listen to the radio, read stories; hoping for something to catch my eye and spark that little something deep in the well of my mind that would jolt the pumps into action, and ideas, like water, would flow forth from my fingertips. Other times an idea would enter my mind of its own volition, and without a by-your-leave, it would set fire to the two story, three bedroom, one and a half bath, Tudor style house of my imagination. These were always the best ones, but fortunately, they were infrequent, for it is hard to find someone who would insure my imagination, and these burning ideas were very rough on the woodwork. It wasn’t long after one of these arson-inclined ideas had just come through, burning every other story out of my mind and leaving my imagination homeless that I went on my first hunt. I was sitting in front of my computer, staring at a blank screen of white that refused to hold any sentence more intelligible than “Susie’s rats don’t have leukemia because injured grasshoppers use pogo-sticks to jump over the lazy brown dog”. Before you go counting letters, that sentence doesn’t contain f, q, w, or x, so don’t waste your time, I already wasted mine. But that’s beside the point. Feeling frustrated and infuriated with Susie and her goddamn cancer-free rats, and not caring whether their healthy state was due to grasshoppers and indolent canines or not, I stood up from my computer, walked into the kitchen, and got a beer from the refrigerator. At least, that’s what I’d intended to do. Halfway through the living room, my own lazy brown dog decided that my stocking clad feet resembled his favorite chew toy, and leapt to his feet (san pogo-stick assistance. He wasn’t, after all, a paraplegic grasshopper) to pursue what, to his failing eyes, resembled a rubber hot dog moving rapidly in the direction of his food bowl. Having had similar hallucinations myself, I can’t blame the old bastard for his overreaction, but I can very well blame him for what happened because of it. As his teeth sank into the unsuspecting flesh of my gray cotton sock, I lost my balance, fell backward over an easy chair, and hit my head on the coffee table. At least I think it was the coffee table, it could have been the ottoman. I never did like ottomans, or their damn empires