I came across this scrap while digging backwards through some research materials for Under the Poppy, and was surprised – really surprised – to see it:

..stage, ragged blue curtains and dancing puppets and “Oh Meester,” one of the puppets croons, a lady-puppet with snarled red curls, “won’t you dance with me?  The music is so beautiful.”

“It would be my pleasure,” says the other puppet, a soldier-puppet in spurs and shiny braid.  The puppets are made to move by sticks and strings, it is something Ginevra has never seen but only read about: they are called marionettes.  At least Achille taught her to read. . . .

The puppets start swaying in their warped-flute dance but soon become hopelessly tangled, not because the puppeteer is clumsy but because he is very skillful, he has wrapped the soldier-puppet in the lady-puppet’s strings like a spider does a fly and “My mother warned me!” the soldier-puppet shrieks, and the people watching shriek too, laughing and shouting out advice – “Cut the strings!’ “Give her the boots!” – as if the soldier-puppet was a living actor.

What blew my mind about this passage was its provenance – the thing must be five or six years old.  It comes from a YA fantasy novel that I’d begun (can’t find the file and don’t remember the working title; maybe it had none?) and then set aside, having run out of fun and momentum at the same time.  There were no prostitutes in it as I recall, although there was a blind boy I liked a whole lot, and bees, who migrated to yet another book of mine (Kissing the Bee, a YA novel).  But voila, the puppets. . . . Where do we get our ideas?