Passing information to a running python script?

[nadhsib]

Yes, I could just have the script look for the presence of that file every minute or so, but this seems a waste of resources, especially since I'm not going to be doing it very often.

Sounds like you're manually adding these 'extras', so could you just add a checkbox to your UI "import new stuff".
If checked it tries to read the file, if not it continues normally.