Concept-U-lyse-ation

The story idea comes from anywhere and often starts from something so miniscule you'd hardly know it was there, like a parasite clinging to your eyelash. I am becoming more aware of origins. Perhaps that's the theme of the year. Origin. I wrote a piece called Meditations of Home for a lit magazine (not accepted yet, just to be clear), but more than that, I've started exploring the origins of my food, where does my fruit come from, what is dairy all about.

Discoveries about such origins are leading me on a course towards adopting a vegan diet and, increasingly, a vegan lifestyle. Consequently, I've explored websites of organizations like the Anti-Vivisection Society, the British Vegetarian Society and, naturally, PETA. These research forays have led me to question the ethics of people, the cruelty we are capable of for profit. I won't go into too much now, but should say that this life journey, this investigation of my truths and principles will end up generating writing projects and that the idea starts as an innocent question written down in the back pages of a notebook. It reasserts itself gently so that, each time, it seems like a new idea. It almost cultivates itself until I latch onto it, sink my teeth in and lovingly devour every morsel of it.

PS-Please don't support cruelty and do not buy Merino wool, do your research.

Here is a rough for a story idea, written from the perspective of a young farm boy in Australia:

The sun beat down, that'’s what they say when it’s high noon and hot outside. The shepherd whips off his hat and swipes his forehead before replacing the wide brim. He warns me not to look into the sun for the damage it will bring. His father looked into the sun as a ritual on those days when he tended his sheep in the dusty barren swell of land. At the end of the day, when the work was done, he'd look up in the sky, covered with sweat, I'’d imagine, and said goodbye to the day. He probably thanked god for making him a wool producer and giving him a flock of sheep to tend. Later on, maybe he thanked god for the good fortune of becoming one of the top producers in the country. Eventually all that looking in the sun beat him down and took his sight.

His son took over, tending the flock, selling the wool. The world was becoming modernized by then and the son was from the modern world. He brought in these new sheep, he told me, that would triple his wool production.

The sheep have too much flesh, it folds onto itself and creates pockets of moisture. But all that skin produces wool, said the shepherd, and all that wool means money.

I'’ve been hired on for flystrike season. What is flystrike? I asked the shepherd. It'’s a plague, he said. I'’d be keeping the sheep safe from it.