Q: do you ever have ideas that seem fine by themselves but not when you put them together and if so how do you deal with that
A: well in general i find that it's not a happy strategy to just be frankensteining ideas together. in fact that has never once worked for me. instead what really only seems to work is to custom make the second idea knowing that it's going to go with the first idea. so that means if you have an idea in your idea collection that feels like the second part of something, you're going to have to work backwards and come up with the first part knowing it's going to go to lead into the second part. i should add a disclaimer because sometimes i get hate mail on this subject -- just to clarify, there is surely nothing wrong with combining 2 separate ideas into 1, and it may work very well for other people but it has never worked for me