One place to get a plot

It turns out that one place might be a Thesaurus.  My local Dollar Store has a book section, and during my monthly browse in that crowded aisle I found Webster’s Basic Thesaurus.  Kind of mind-boggling that so much erudition and hard work can be had for a dollar, isn’t it?  I snapped it up. 

A couple of minutes ago I picked it up from my bed pillow [no, I don’t claim to be an erudite egghead; it’s just that even my light going-to-sleep reading tends to be campy].  I opened it at random.  “Undermine,” I read, “v. ...disable...excavate...sabotage.”  Aha! I thought, the very stuff of Dead on Dutcher’s Mountain, my novel about a sadistic saboteur and his hapless girlfriend. 

I returned to the Thesaurus and found, referring to the same word but to an altogether different set of signifiers, “impair...sap...vitiate.”  “Yeah”, thought I, 'undermine’ also refers to what that dirty bastard did to people’s thinking, the way he made them feel crummy and worthless.”   

And then I thought, “Hey!  NaNoWriMo is just around the seasonal corner.  What’ll I write this November?  Maybe...” 

I found this dilly: spray.  Spray is a noun, as in a sheltering bough, a prom-queen’s corsage, a funeral wreath, which connects like magic in my perfervid imagination to a sequence, thus: Under the illusion of sheltering boughs a corsage-wearing prom-queen meets her brutal end and her cynical killer sends a wreath to her funeral.  Then he meets his own violent end in a spray of bullets which atomize his sorry self. 

It’s all in an association of ideas, isn’t it?  I hope I remember it until November.