What inspired you to write your book?

My secondary writing project is a collection of modern paranormal stories inspired by a similar collection by LTC Rolt. I grew up amidst industrial decline and dereliction, our play grounds were abandoned railways and headgear, over grown church yards and spooky woods. We were never short of a ghost story.

I'm going to sound a little crazy here, but I'm going to say it anyway. I was inspired to write my first novel because when I was a child, I was hit by a car that drove pass my school bus on the wrong side of the street. Miraculously nothing happened to be but bumps, bruises and cuts. The only memory I have of that event was this strange warm feeling that was behind me and most importantly on my hands keeping me to the front of the car and not being run over. I believed that this was my guardian angel and when I got older and found my passion to write that was the first thing I wrote was about; angels. After that I became involved with fantasy and creating worlds. It was were I felt I belonged.

angeldove said:

I was inspired to write my first novel because when I was a child, I was hit by a car . . .

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Not crazy at all. I'm assuming your first novel involved a protective spirit. My passion for mysteries was inspired in childhood by learning to track wildlife--seeing what happened by reading signs left behind.

Is your guardian angel novel finished?

Had a suicidal female friend who was sort of my first love. She hated god for what he did to her, and didn't understand why she was given such a bad life. So I wished that I could help give her the answers she wanted, but I obviously couldn't. Very damaged, lots of depression issues, and cut herself a lot. Seeing her like that broke my heart everyday, and I hated god for making her constantly wonder why she's living so miserably. so I thought 'what if' someone was able to pretend to be god or jesus and tell her that things will be okay and that she will live a happy life.

Then I just changed that for a whole book.

I like talking about this.

Indirectly, pretty much everything about my life and upbringing inspirsd my writing, especially my choice to write primarily in the Antebellum South.

But what specifically inspired the MS that snagged me an agent was a memoir by Fanny Kemble, an English actress who married a plantation owner and wrote all about her impressions of a Georgia Sea Islands plantation. Also, things that went into that: Gone with the Wind (the book), my visits to multiple Civil War battlefields during the recent 150th of the war, etc.

What specifically inspired the novella I wrote was the story idea of an AW friend here, which somehow tripped off an idea in my mind: a kind of Beauty-and-the-Beast story set in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War. Things that also went into that: my hikes in the Shenandoah and a visit to the Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD.

I also wrote a WIP set in Pre-Revolutionary France, inspired by the true story of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. I read a fantastic book on it, The Queen's Necklace, and just had to write a novel about it.

I just remembered...my first published novel. I was coming out of a grocery store. The area was just being built up...across the street were about 4 boarded up houses skedded to be demolished for a mall to go up. When I came out of the grocery store one of them was just going up into flames. I stood and watched the whole thing burn to the ground and was mesmerized by how quickly it happened...and how the fire department kind of just supervised the fire. I came up with the idea for Summer on Fire while watching that house burn to the ground. That was fun instant research that--er--sparked an idea!

Oh, and I almost forgot my current WIP!

It was partly inspired by the story behind Peter Pan--not so much the play/book themselves, but the story of the real boys who inspired it (and NOT the Finding Neveraland version, which was a papered-over version at best). It's set around WW1 and is about a young man who can't die and doesn't grow old (he isn't a boy, but you know).

The series I'm currently writing: Back when I was fifteen, I wrote a writing journal entry for my high school creative writing class. Then I read a short novel one of my friends had written instead of editing a different short story. After that, I decided I could also write a fantasy novel, and so I took that journal entry and expanded it into a four-book series. Since then, it has been through a lot of rewrites and barely resembles the story it originally was.


For my MG fantasy series, I basically decided to see what would happen if you combined the magic of Harry Potter with more of a high-tech setting and a smarter main character.

For my second epic fantasy series, I thought of a world with a dying sun. The rest of the story developed from there.

For my third epic fantasy series, I decided I wanted to set a book in more of a tropical setting, and things developed from there.

There were a lot of things that came together, but one of them was a certain book,

The Way to a Man's Heart
The Settlement Cook Book
by Mrs. Simon Kandler.

Mrs. Kandler's mission was to teach immigrant Jewish women how to cook like real Americans, i.e. to discard that embarrassingly un-American way of doing things, keeping kosher.

It speaks to a brief period in American history when already assimilated Jews practically turned themselves inside out to keep from being "tarred with the same brush" as their "immigrant co-religionists."

Generally it's a topic that interests me that spurs an idea for one of my books. One book though was inspired by a death in the family. The hardest part of the death was knowing I'd never get to see them again. So I began a book about a woman who becomes immortal and is always left behind and always has to deal with losing her loved ones. There is also the flip side of her having to leave her loved ones so as not to raise suspicions of her immortality.

I was just minding my own business reading crap on the internet one day when I came across an interesting article regarding simulations and virtual reality. I've always enjoyed cyberpunk, and I love the Matrix (the first one), but I was never really interested in writing about it until this article. In a nutshell, our simulation technology and virtual reality are getting better all the time. That's obvious. And, assuming the human race doesn't wipe itself out, in a few hundred years our ability to create simulated realities will be quite advanced. And when we reach that point, we'll be using AI to create simulations of our reality in order to predict events. For example, I want to see how a certain person might react if I say a specific thing to them. And, of course, there are all types of scientific reasons to create simulations (predicting the weather for example). So, taking this to the extreme, it posses a question. If, in the distant future, our descendants are capable of creating perfect simulations of our universe, are we currently in one of them? Is our reality a simulation? How would we know? This, believe it or not, is actually a question that is posed at several major universities. There really are people trying to figure out how to determine if our reality is inside a computer.

So, this was my inspiration. This was the concept I ran with because, unlike the Matrix, our reality doesn't have any bodies. We aren't 'plugged in' somewhere, we're simply AI living in a vast super-advanced computer network that contains trillions of simulations all designed to predict specific futures and outcomes. Or, they're just there for fun. In fact, there are a lot of reasons and many of the simulations are different. So then I had to ask myself, what if there was a way to move between them? And what if someone were given APIs into the system that allowed them some level of control? What if some of these people exist in our simulation right now? What if you met one of them and they gave you an API?

What if you jumped?

Some really beautiful and inspirational stories here I've been writing since I was little, a form of escape, I guess. Mostly fan fiction stuff and short stories and novellas. For my current WIPs, it was when I was playing this video game at 16 years old, and was *so* in love with one of the male characters! I thought he was so cool and such a badass. So I wrote a book with him as a character (changed names obviously, haha). Through the years, as I took writing more seriously, it kind of just blew up from there, and turned into a full-fledged story.

One day I just got the image of giant golem-like creatures marching on a walled city in my mind and it kept coming back. Even after I failed writing the first chapter twice, it wouldn't get out of my head, so I tried again a while later and managed to capture it.

Whilst convalescing I was bedbound. I wrote a couple of short stories to help pass the time. Later I expanded one of them to around 53,000 words and that is where it has stayed. Then I had two small scenarios in mind for separate stories. I had no view of what these 'stories' might amount to in length. Then I wondered if they could both fit into something of book length. I started to expand those two scenes and suddenly found that I needed to invent characters and places and maintain consistency in the characters of the fictional individuals in the book. This was exciting. I could choose to set the story anywhere. I chose France. I invented several towns and villages. I was having so much fun that I was left feeling disappointed when I finished. That made me wonder if I could write a second novel using the same characters. I had become very fond of them and couldn't just let them go. I am now one third through book 6 and still relishing every minute. I enjoy editing and correcting almost as much.

My life, my work, my travels are the inspiration.
I use people whom I knew as models for my characters.

My current WIP started as an image of myself in my car at the time. I imagined myself driving down one of the main roads in my city (Colorado Springs), when suddenly there's a bright flash. I wake up laying next to my car, with everyone else gone. What, then, could I do with my city, having it all to myself? Then someone asked, "Where are the zombies?" As much as I love the zombie concept, I've seen a lot of piss-poor slasher flicks and generally poor treatment I call "fight, retreat, rinse, repeat." I decided to take a more realistic approach, so my zombies really aren't zombies, in the classic sense. I also wanted to avoid cliches in characters, so I built a cast that I felt defied many cliches in the zombie genre.

As the book concept developed, the "not-zombies" moved further and further into the background, to where they're almost a footnote. Instead, my own issues with bipolar disorder and child abuse-related PTSD, as well as with spina bifida, have led me to develop a character who deals with physical disability and mental illness. In a very real sense, the monsters inside his head are just as dangerous as the ones at his doorstep. There is a romance arc over what I intend to be a series, because I can't justify cramming all of a romance arc into one book.

Book 1: I badly wanted a YA fantasy with a fat FMC who goes around having awesome adventures. Couldn't find such a story, so I decided to write one myself.

Book 2: Had a dream about a little girl hiding from a bad guy, and then stealing a beautiful, antique revolver, and shooting him when he came for her. I couldn't get the dream out of my head, so I started wondering who she was hiding from and why he was after her, and before I knew it, I had an entire city on the brink of civil war pouring out of my heid.

Book 3: One of my friends told me about her WIP about a writer who turned out to be a serial killer, and it inspired me to do a story about a girl who accidentally kills someone who is very dear to her boyfriend.

Book 4: I had writing constipation and hadn't written anything new for a while. I kept starting and abandoning projects, and finally I decided I was going to write something fun and light for once. I'd been on a Rainbow Rowell binge, and I wanted to do something like ATTACHMENTS, which I thought was really cute. I played around with several different premises and finally settled on one. I guess book 4 is the only one where I wasn't really hit by inspiration. I was consciously looking for a new book idea, and it was the result of me knocking my head against the wall for quite a while before finding a premise that worked.

Book 5: I've been really depressed about my writing the past year or so because of problems with my agents, and I realized that I wrote book 4 almost 2 years ago. That's 2 whole years spent not writing anything new!! Mr. Putt gave me a pep talk and basically told me I needed to take myself seriously as a writer if I wanted to "make it", and I realized he was right. So, just as with book 4, I looked hard for ideas. Anything that caught my fancy was jotted down into my phone. And, just like book 4, I got inspired by a book I read. It was about a guy who stalks a girl and ends up killing her. It got me hopping mad, the way the girl was nothing but a victim, and I started wondering, Well, what if the girl turns out to be even more dangerous than the guy? And book 5 was borne. I'm still writing it. The end is near! If everything goes well, I should finish the first draft by today.

My WIP sprang from a prompt in an online writing class to describe someone's most treasured possession. Everyone seemed to be posting everyday stuff, so I decided to go in entirely the other direction:

Jennifer’s most treasured possession is a shabby white umbrella that had once belonged to her maternal grandmother. The umbrella itself had been found in the early summer of 1964, jauntily propped up against a bench in Central Park, next to box of bric-a-brac and a small handwritten note saying, simply, “Take Me”. During each full moon, the umbrella transforms itself into a fox named George, who smokes Cohiba Robusto cigars and cheats badly at poker while giving Jennifer advice about her love life.

Afterwards, the idea just kept calling to me. Eventually, I gave in and started writing it.

It's morphed from there. Jennifer became a young witch called January, but that's where George came from -- and he sparked the whole thing.

My newest idea came from Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. The new-fangled features of the 1910s downtown area are described, and it hit me that I saw these same buildings from the other side as they were abandoned, boarded up, or partitioned in CPA and lawyer's offices. I decided to visit Lewis' Gopher Prairie, Minnesota 100 years later with similar characters with similar ambitions, but with my own perspective.

Pennguin said:

My current WIP started as an image of myself in my car at the time. I imagined myself driving down one of the main roads in my city (Colorado Springs), when suddenly there's a bright flash. I wake up laying next to my car, with everyone else gone. What, then, could I do with my city, having it all to myself? Then someone asked, "Where are the zombies?" As much as I love the zombie concept, I've seen a lot of piss-poor slasher flicks and generally poor treatment I call "fight, retreat, rinse, repeat." I decided to take a more realistic approach, so my zombies really aren't zombies, in the classic sense. I also wanted to avoid cliches in characters, so I built a cast that I felt defied many cliches in the zombie genre.

As the book concept developed, the "not-zombies" moved further and further into the background, to where they're almost a footnote. Instead, my own issues with bipolar disorder and child abuse-related PTSD, as well as with spina bifida, have led me to develop a character who deals with physical disability and mental illness. In a very real sense, the monsters inside his head are just as dangerous as the ones at his doorstep. There is a romance arc over what I intend to be a series, because I can't justify cramming all of a romance arc into one book.

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I like the idea of a zombie story that isn't actually about the zombies, even as a metaphor...

edutton said:

I like the idea of a zombie story that isn't actually about the zombies, even as a metaphor...

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Thank you. I'm not a fan of traditional zombie lore, though I have respect for Romero's trendsetting film. The remakes, not so much. Too often I find zombie films are "gore porn," or just boring, disjointed combat scenes. The indie films are far too often about sitting around, getting to know fellow survivors. Some of the "Resident Evil" films were impressive in their treatment of the zombie issue, juxtaposed with the video game lore. Beyond that, I don't mind a good fight scene, but I prefer movies with substance.

I outline my WIPs using Scrivener's screenplay format, because it focuses my attention to what's absolutely necessary for the scene. I still add little embellishments, like what music I'd like to have for certain scenes, so I can listen to those playlists while I write the actual WIP. Lots of classical music in this one.

My current idea just came from 1 line I heard on TV, and a dream...most of my ideas seem to come from that, and then brainstorming on it!

Pennguin said:

Thank you. I'm not a fan of traditional zombie lore, though I have respect for Romero's trendsetting film. The remakes, not so much.

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It's popular to dump on Romero, and to be fair he did make a lot of crap movies - but both the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead actually had something to say, unlike most of what passes for horror (in film) nowadays.

Pennguin said:

I outline my WIPs using Scrivener's screenplay format, because it focuses my attention to what's absolutely necessary for the scene. I still add little embellishments, like what music I'd like to have for certain scenes, so I can listen to those playlists while I write the actual WIP. Lots of classical music in this one.

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That's an interesting idea! I may try that with my next MS, just for fun. I actually have an outline for that one, unlike the current story that was almost completely pantsed...

The new WIP is one of my stories where I began by describing a setting and let it run from there. I think where it has gone is heavily influenced by The Debt to Pleasure and pretty much any Shakespearean tragedy. But there is no memory of a single moment of inspiration.

For The Paper House, I just had a notion of a woman who was grieving but believed she could be "rescued" by her garden. The garden itself was really what inspired me to write it.

The Gulf came to me as one story, while I was reading The Fishermen. It's really nothing like the latter at all, but something about the mood of that book made me think of a specific Australian rural town, and the story appeared from nowhere. That hardly ever happens to me, so that was pretty good inspiration!

The third book came from a dream I had, about a man tuning pianos from under his staircase.