Hallo! So, random curiosity post time: what inspired you to write your stories? My fantasy was mainly inspired by an old webcomic 'Kureinai Mashin' about a blind elf assassin ostracized from his peers. It went on for three books and I loved the crap out of it. That is...until the author stopped updating it in 2007 right at a cliffhanger when Kureinai (the blind guy)'s companion was critically injured fighting a stone monster. So I had a choice, I could grumble about a webcomic that was for all intents and purposes 'dead', or go write a story of my own. Hence the creation of Mishu Jerni. My historical mystery featuring Amos Garnier, my blind French detective, was actually inspired by a biography of Louis Braille I read in high school. Specifically the part where Louis and his companion had to track down the French general who created a raised alphabet system for his men to read at night (that's how Louis got his idea.) My sci-fi? Mass Effect. The whole 'Helen Chert finds a kid' thing was mainly derived from 'Star Trek' and how they seem to allow children to meander about the USS Enterprise. A warship. Because that totally makes sense. So what were your inspirations?
Honestly? My jacket. It's one of those quilted things, and the company logo on the front had a rose and the name Wild Roses on the breast of the jacket. Then one of my co-workers told me it looked kind of like a flight jacket or like I should be driving a tank. And I went..."Huh. Wonder what kind of group would be called the Wild Roses and wear a flight/riding jacket?" And it went from there. The Wild Roses are now an all-female company of Beast Riders who ride such things as hippogriffs, pegasi, griffins, hellhounds, war unicorns, and a few more I made up. And my MC will get a dragon. Woot!
A couple of Januaries ago after pretty much the coldest night of the year, I had to get up to get to work. It was probably around 7 in the morning and I'm not sure how cold it was because my thermometer bottoms out at around -42, but my truck, understandably enough, wouldn't start. When I opened the hood to see if the block heater was working I skinned my knuckles and little droplets of blood landed on the fan housing. They froze the instant they landed and turned a bright pink, like the colour of Pepto Bismol, and I thought, wouldn't it be insane if someone got murdered in this weather. How festive it would look if the walls and cars and floor were plastered with this spray of bright pink confetti that glittered in the sun and the horrible implications that confetti held. So I wrote it down my ideas and now I'm finally getting the time to work on it.
Watching Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition. I was on the treadmill at the time and I remember getting a plot bunny about a personal trainer who falls in love with his client while helping said client achieve a major fitness transformation over the course of many months. 2.5 years and almost 100K words later, I'm halfway done with the final chapter of the book, entitled Gravity.
LAFS was spawned from a vague mental image and the line / two lines that accompanied it. Blue was a vague mental image from a dream that, frankly, got way out of control. CPPI is a repackaging of a subplot from another project that got so severely reworked as to be unrecognizable. I think I got the idea for Salt by looking at Star Wars / Mad Max mashup au fanart? I kinda forget how we got from there to here though
It evolved from a scene I wrote for a class a few years back. But once I got into it, tried to put some meat on the characters' bones, they took it places I didn't know I could imagine. Right now it's hard slogging because they are going places I don't want to go. But I know I have a tendency to write nice and light and maybe a tad boring. These people are not nice, but I hope they are interesting.
Believe it or not, it was a dream. Or rather, a couple of dream fragments that I managed to hang on to and make some sense of. The specific details were completely weird in dream scenarios, but it was backed by the in-dream memory of the situation where two young people were placed together in a park ride because of their position in line and the rest of (one of theirs) party was not right behind him but fell behind and he had made it to the front of the line, and it was either get in the ride now or not. The dream-logic ride doesn't make much sense, but he ends up helping her. So, chance meeting at a park kind of thing. Thinking about that and a couple other items, once extracted from the dream and rationalized, I dreamed about that (more or less) as a starting point. Certain story events came to me fully formed, as if I had just watched a movie. It was when I realized that I was dreaming in text that I decided I had to write it up. By that I mean that when something was seen or done in the dream “movie”, I was aware of descriptive narration going along with it. Basically, it was the reverse of the process of reading a book, where the text gets imagined onto the mind’s eye. So maybe I was dreaming of reading? Since coming up with an actual story/plot is my problem area for fiction (rather than just SciFi ideas and premise) I figured it was an opportunity I should take advantage of. Even though it’s utterly different than my area of interest, I know what’s happening. And I can still bring a little SciFi into it, setting it slightly in the future and having the heros’ spectacular things be technological rather than light fantasy magic. Meanwhile… I was lamenting how something like 50 Shades could be so successful, with another sequel movie showing up on the imdb home page, when it’s so bad! So that’s where the easy money is, and the bar is quite low: make the main character a promiscuous bisexual nudist and how can you fail? I also notice how movies are needing to add completely gratuitous sex scenes just to check a box when it is not important to the plot or perhaps not even indicated in the plot, so it’s quite contrived. A couple decades ago there was a story printed in one of the major sci-fi magazines that featured a graphic sex scene, and the letters to the editor in subsequent months were calling that out as being inappropriate. But the author and editor defended it as-printed, pointing out that this experience was a major transformative event for the character, who then changed his goals and motivation mid-story. So I knew this was possible: why not write something where the sex scenes are not gratuitous at all, but serve the purpose of showing the character’s state of mind (through inner dialog, through choosing and avoiding specific opportunities, etc.) and in themselves serving to transform the characters attitudes toward different facets of relationships and evaluate life choices.
I listen to a lot of strange music and once I heard The Mars Volta's Frances The Mute, I looked into the concept of that album and found out it was based off a diary a friend of the band found in a car once. Anothe album was Ghost Reveries by Opeth. It's supposedly about an occult. I took some inspirations from those albums and the mood the songs give me and I wanted to write my own little enigma.
My current WIP, -Nerium- The Song 'The Passing of the Elves' and Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart inspired me. I wanted to write a story with 'Hellraiser' type of beings that could sing the most beautiful music ever imagined.
Makes sense to me! My current WIP started from a dream I had two nights in a row. The first scene is the dream, exactly. The guy had a Russian accent, and somewhere in there, I wondered what things were like for people who defected from the USSR. The girl who was with him in the dream was evasive, so I added that as a plot point. The germ of inspiration before any of that was a certain celebrity's eyes. I was so distracted by their azure blue color, I couldn't focus on what he was saying in a YouTube interview I was watching, so I gave the MC his eye color.
A very long time ago, I tried to write a story that was...different. Not that the topic was unusual; I was a female preteen, the topic was talking unicorns. But I wanted it to stand out from the other preteen-esque stories about talking unicorns. It was quite rubbish. Thankfully, I've moved on to slightly more mature topics (No offense to Bruce Coville, or any of the other writers of books about unicorns for young teenage girls). But I held onto the idea of writing something unusual, even if the setting itself wasn't particularly fantastic or extraordinary. Then I got the single most boring job that probably exists. 12 hours on an assembly line, more or less alone in my own head. I began to spin in my head a story about an immortal woman in the world of the tv series Andromeda; she may have started out as someone like me, in form and personality, but she quickly grew to become her own, demanding character. She demanded more story than I could hold in my head; more characters orbiting than I could keep straight without writing. She demanded a world of her own, not bound by the constraints of someone else's universe. But what story could I tell? Miranda by herself was an...inadequate leading lady, and her story was too much for an initial novel. And then...and then I watched the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie. I don't think I've ever been quite so moved by the psychological premise of a movie, except maybe V for Vendetta. There was something thrilling, something grandly simple about it--the idea that there was no man more dangerous than a good man, doing the worst thing for the best possible reason. I knew my setting, if I was to write a book, had to be one to suit Miranda; thus was born the world I have created. A story set in the distant future; the 'modern' humans are descended from the ancient human bloodline, which reached out long ago to the stars and mingled (sometimes biblically) with the races they found there. The pantheon of gods is strong and lively; the priesthood is one of three political forces in the galaxy. The second is the mages' college, the Vardane; I tried to do without, but I simply couldn't write a functional science-fiction universe without adding magic to make up for my shortcomings. The last is the Constellar Imperium, which rules the galaxy. Here is the most important part. The main character is a part of that Imperium; the story is about how he deals with his entire universe crumbling around his ears as the Imperium loses its war. It's written from the point of view of the losing side, showing that there are good men on both sides. Good men, who do the best they can with what they're given.
