An extended answer to a common question

This is how I know I'm not an author.

I have a credit card with an issuer that isn't my normal bank. It is the only relationship I have with that company and the amount of personal information I have with them is deliberately minimal. I had to call them yesterday to make a change to the card account. Because of recent "Know Your Customer" legislation, there is a whole bunch of identification authentication that I had to go through with the call centre person - its all about preventing identity theft. It was quite a struggle for the call centre person to find enough questions for me to answer and likewise quite a struggle for me to answer some of them - I don't use this card much and so its been years since I interacted with the issuer.

So I started thinking about identity and how easy it would be to lose your verifiable identity - not have it stolen but just by carelessness lose track of it. It could lead to a new set of people falling into the underclass - still capable of functioning but unable to interact with the mechanisms of infrastructure. Its not a new idea. In fact, re-reading Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere last week probably influenced my thoughts here and there are plenty of other stories set in underclasses of various sort. But offhand I don't recall ever reading the story of the slide into that state - the step by step loss of memory or competence that could reduce a person to lose their way because they couldn't establish their identity.

So here is a story idea that I like and want to see. If I was an author, I'd want to write that story or at least store it away in my ideas bank for possible later use. But I'm not - I just want to read that story. Its like that with any idea I might have. I want to absorb and enjoy what somebody else does with that idea, not write it myself. It also explains why I admire the people who are able to feed that want.