Inspirations

      I'm never quite sure where my writing ideas come from. I can trace them -- sort of -- but lots of things swirl together in the blender of my mind. (We're doing cooking metaphors today. See how many you can spot.) Everything gets mixed up in there, and eventually something pours out.
      For instance, the recipe for my stalled fantasy novel Dragons Gather started with me reading a book about a carnival. Well, really the book was a mystery about a murder at a carnival, but I thought the carnival was more interesting than the mystery. It occurred to me that a carnival in a land where magic existed faced certain problems. What wonders would they have to perform to keep a crowd's interest?
      Some more ingredients. Sometime back I read Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. I found the theme of guilt and redemption to be powerful in those books. Particularly the idea that innocence was precious but also powerless to defend itself.
      A few years ago, a friend of mine fell in love with a woman who had a criminal record, drug and alcohol problems, and a host of other emotional issues. A lot of us thought he'd lost his mind, but he loved her and kept loving her and that love changed her. They're married today and have two children. Their life together speaks much about the redemptive power of love.
      And also from real life, I watched a friend leave his marriage, not realizing that what he really wanted from life was her. By the time he figured it out, she had moved on to a new love. It was a hard lesson, and one that almost broke him.
      So from all that came Dragons Gather, the story of man who thinks that magic is what he needs, ignoring love until he suffers the tragic consequences of his choice and realizes his folly too late.
      Or something like that. When I got into the story, the characters had their own ideas about how it was going to work out. After 65,000 or so words, I realized that none of us knew where we were going. I set it aside. I will come back to it and finish it soon, I hope, but for now, I have to figure out where it's going and why.
      Now Darkness, Oklahoma has its origins from a series of books that I read back in college. Thieves World was a shared world series that featured short stories from various authors using the same setting and many of the same characters. In its heyday, it was exciting reading and proof that too many cooks don't necessarily spoil the soup.
      After Holly Lisle came by my blog and I read her excellent books, I started to think how cool it would be to co-author something with her. And maybe with S.L. Viehl. And Lazette Gifford. And what about Carolyn Hart? How cool would it be to work with all of them?
      So I thought of a town in which all the fictional monsters of the world -- vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, zombies, witches, etc. -- gathered to make a life for themselves. I thought about how that town would function and what monsters would be there. To keep an unity that Thieves World lacked, I wanted a back story to the town, a secret war that affected everyone and provided a basis for all the various stories, some of which would prominently feature the war, some of which wouldn't, depending on the authors' tastes.
      Well, the idea was cool, but naturally I never approached any of those authors about it. I couldn't imagine why they would want to write with me, considering my lack of publishing credits. (Two one-act plays, a host of poems, one poetry chapbook, newspaper articles and a few magazine articles aren't publishing credits that scream, "New York Best Selling Author." And my entire 'relationship' with the above-mentioned authors consists of reading their blogs and books, a few comments and a couple of emails -- hardly anything to start us picking out china patterns together.) Besides, I got interested in the war and the stories of the people and the monsters and how the town would actually work if such a thing existed. In other words, it went from being a shared world to my world.
      I spoke with Crystal about the story (Crystal and I have written three plays together, and I've found she's an excellent person to bounce story ideas off of) and she helped me by asking questions that further refined the plot. Eventually I had to start writing it. NaNoWriMo came by at the right time. NaNoWriMo's daily quota also convinced me I needed an outline for the story, something I didn't do for Dragon's Gather, which could be why it stalled and a way to get it going again.
      I have never followed a recipe exactly. As I've mentioned, I've varied from the outline some, but I still seem to be heading in the right direction. I'm hoping that by NaNoWriMo's end, I'll have some delicious reading to share with you. (Oh, I'm up to 14,044 words, by the way. Still on track.)