Where do you get your ideas? If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’ve gotten this question before. The truth is, for me at least, every idea is different and enters my life in a different manner. This is the story of one of them. This is how PAPER CUTS came to be. First, if you like, you can go read the 16-page comic in its entirety here.

This idea originated from November 23 to November 27, 2002. I was working at Burke Williams Day Spa and they had set up a kiosk in the mall to sell gift certificates for the holiday season. This was a notoriously boring shift, with no one else to talk to, few sales, and nothing to do on the kiosk’s stripped-down laptop but use Word or play solitaire for eight hours at a time. It was my first year at the kiosk, but a tradition was kept from the year before called The Kiosk Diaries, where each of us would record a diary throughout our shift, both to stave off our own boredom and to give whoever worked after us something to read to stave off their boredom.

I wrote scary amounts of pages every shift I had, literally just writing down whatever came to my mind. From answering the phone to people-watching to seeing a children’s magician perform in the food court upstairs to wondering what would happen if the poster next to me somehow came to life. What would it say? What would I say back? This, obviously is the idea at the center of PAPER CUTS. These are the actual bebe posters that inspired the character Pandora:

(PS – If anyone knows who this model is or who the photographer is, please let me know. I’ve been unable to discover their names and I’d like to give credit where credit is due)

I ended up assembling parts of my diary entries together into a short story called THE GLUTTONS HAVE HUNGRY EYES. Here’s the opening:

“I’m wedged between Morgan de toi and bebe, between white and black, between past and future. Over my shoulder Windsor glitters and shimmers, but I’m afraid to look. Afraid I might be poised on the precipice of the edge of the world and there’s nothing in the blackness stretched behind me but abject consumerism and the eyes of TRL. The gluttons have hungry eyes.”

I really like the title, and will perhaps reuse it someday on something that will see publication. The title itself had come to me about a year previous as I was driving out to the Valley to tutor. I remember that seeing a dead groundhog on the side of the highway was the inspiration that somehow birthed the title in my mind, but I can no longer remember the chain of thought from one to the other. I have whole notebooks of fragments like these: titles without stories, scenes without context, dialogue without characters. Every writer should hang onto their fragments.

Later I was looking for a short comic idea to use as a self-publishing guinea pig and hit upon adapting THE GLUTTONS HAVE HUNGRY EYES. And that’s how PAPER CUTS came to be. Noel Tuazon and I self-published it as a mini for San Deigo 2004, then later in the summer of 2006 Noel redrew it in a different style, and it’s this version that was published in Blurred Vision 2, and which you just read online.

So there’s the story complete of how at least one story idea came to be.