Ideas from . . . out there somewhere

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Okay, so maybe the idea of blogging everyday isn’t going too well for me. Life happens.

For instance, yesterday, when I wasn’t working on Secrets, I was plotting out a new book. Right, I know, too many in the pipeline now. But when ideas come, I have to write them down, especially when I don’t know where they came from.

The first time I was asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” I was on the radio with a local celebrity host, talking about my new Christian science fiction magazine. He caught me off guard – I didn’t expect that cliched question to come at me. This was 13 years ago, and I wasn’t as prepared then as I would be today.

Local guy, however, had an agenda. He really wanted to get my opinion on another man he’d interviewed, one who claimed to have had his novels channeled to him by an alien. Maybe. Or it might have been some ancient “god.” I don’t remember. I do wish we’d been on TV, because the looks on my face would have entertained the troops without me saying a word.

I have no idea who he was talking about. He didn’t tell me. And for the sake of my continuing to read certain SF authors, I hope I never find out.

Ah, but back to the my plot. I was having one of my odd, yogurt-induced dreams, this one about dogs and wooden kennels (don’t ask), when it morphed into me walking along a field road, next to newly planted corn. There was a man with me, and I saw a woman’s body at the end of one row. Posed, a yellow daisy in her hair. The man told me she had been killed fifty years ago.

That’s it. I woke up. As I struggled to get out of my sleep fog (R is NOT a morning person…), the rest of the plot began popping into my head. So I wrote it up, a set-up, although I may use it for the prologue. But now it’s down, and I won’t forget, no matter how long it takes me to get back to it.

There’s really nothing particularly mystical about this. I’m well aware that this was probably inspired by my recent fascination with the Black Dahlia murder and the items I’ve read about it. The girl with the daisy was posed in a similar fashion to Elizabeth Short’s corpse, although my lady was still in one piece. My story also has nothing to do with LA or that case; it’s set in the South and involves some cross-generational riffs.

My point is that I’ve lost track of how many stories I’ve developed that began with a single image–a shoe in the mud, a set of canopic jars, a cat in a bookstore–and blossomed because of my constantly asking the next question: who, when, what, where, and how. My newswriting professor would be pleased.

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