Kage Baker considered herself in the business of telling the future.

In high school, she earned lunch money by telling Tarot cards for her classmates. There is probably no more susceptible audience for this than Catholic school girls – even though Kage warned all of them: “The cards never lie. The old gypsy woman, she’s full of shit; but the cards never lie.”

It was why she became a writer, and even more why she found herself writing science fiction. She decided that her ideas were simply too weird for ordinary literary fiction. Editorial rejections delicately citing “peculiarly fantastical” elements convinced her that her stories of clockwork lovers and otherworldly EBays were not for the general public.

“I’m not precious enough, or gory enough,” she complained bitterly. “If I wrote about fairies in the bottom of the garden, or ghastly chthonic gods, I’d be a best seller.”

“So write about those,” I suggested.

“No, I hate stories like that!”

She didn’t like science fiction much, either. She didn’t read it for pleasure (unlike me). But when she decided that science fiction was the genre to which she could most successfully submit her stories, it was hard science articles where she hunted most for ideas. She tried to anchor her writing in extrapolation on something that was actually happening; and, hopefully, something no one else had written on copiously.

Since Kage also brought her own ideas, fantastical or not, and her own inimitable style to whatever she wrote – it worked. She began to sell. She also began to have more story ideas than she had time to write. I could never convince her to keep a To Be Written file – she had a Chubb safe of a memory for story ideas – but she did assign me the task of keeping files of news on things peculiar or futuristic or phenomenal.

Once we started to look, the stories were everywhere! Delightfully, you, Dear Readers, began to send articles her way, as well. A lot of you still send ideas to me, and I file them away gratefully; sometimes they are marvelously weird, too, and I enjoy them enormously. While doing some housekeeping chores on my computer, I found a partial list of some of these potential gems, and I thought it would be entertaining to share them with you. If any of you are being re-gifted with something you sent me, I do apologize. And thank you.

Real Global Project To Find Missing Species https://tinyurl.com/mvsn4x3

Medieval Antibiotics – retro tech!    https://tinyurl.com/mavc8m6

Foxes Into Dogs: unexpected rules of evolution   https://tinyurl.com/k6o6csf

Somatic Mosaicism. We are all legion.   goo.gl/FNZTbY

Morning Glory Seeds Will Rule the Universe   https://tinyurl.com/lkj2wxy

In the meantime, I want to tell you all, Dear Readers, that I was stunned, amazed and humbly delighted at the huge number of messages you sent me when I posted two days ago. I really had no idea that so many of you were waiting patiently for me to say something – although Kimberly told, and continues to tell me every day, that people want to hear from me … really nice people. Rare, shining, wonderful people. I will be answering each of you as soon as I can. Thank you, thank you, thank you!