Short Story ideas...the dryad idea. A first person dark piece called "Why I don't own a gun". A story, which although it has been done as a character sketch before has not as far as I know been done as a stand alone story, about a man who is the CEO of a reasonably large company that has no idea what he is doing, but has no resposibilities and has gotten by on illusion, and what happens when a young man discovers his secret. The story of how the consciousness directing the archetype of Grendel finally gets caught, like so many of his brethren, by the plastic-izing and commercialization of the once sacred that marks modern day society, eventually being reduced to the form and relative harmlessness of Oscar the Grouch. (Potential copyright issues here. I think the Mouse Machine [tm] owns most of that stuff. Find a way to make an oblique reference.) A dutch woman accidently rediscovers some ancient principle of alchemy through her endless experimentation with soups in her kitchen...say the philosopher's stone or the stone of gold or something, "But it didn't make a very good soup..."