For Sale: Ideas

When I was a kid, drawing was probably the number one past time for my sisters and me in our house. My father is an artist and had all of the supplies at hand, all we had to do was grab a stack of paper, a few different shades of pencils, some pastels, charcoal, an eraser that looked like Silly Putty ... whatever we thought we might need. Supplies were never the problem for me, ideas were. I would sit at the table with all of these tools spread in front of me and just stare off into space. "What should I draw?" I would ask. I'd look around the room or try to imagine a scene, yet felt any idea was forced and, therefore, I was uninspired. Perhaps this is why I never developed the skill.

Writing is different. Ideas aren't a hangup for me when I have a pencil and lined paper in hand (we're talking about fiction here, column and story ledes are a whole other matter). Now, I'm not saying all ideas are particularly good, or that they are necessarily worthy of pursuit, just that there has never been a kink in that particular creative hose.

The problem I do have, and this is new for me, is when I come up with an idea that is good, and probably much more marketable than anything else I've written, but I just don't want to write it. I've got a couple of ideas now - one is for a young adult series that involves some fantasy and passing through portals and such, and the other is science fiction and may work better as a script. These are two genres that I simply have no interest in, not enough to sit and write tens of thousands of words on them anyway.

Are ideas salable? Is there some sort of Cogitation Craigslist out there? Because I really like these ideas and would love to see them written, just not by me. So if you find yourself sitting in front of that blank page with no good young adult fantasy or science fiction ideas, send me your credit card info and they're yours. Cheap.