It's another rainy Monday here in Southern Maine, the first of August and it doesn't look much bettter than the rest of the summer week starts. It was an unusually cold winter and the summer has been plagued by gloomy gray days. Definitely not a beach day. The good thing about it, of course, is it allows plenty of time to update web sites, babble on in blogs and...oh, yeah, write!

When I meet fans or tell folks I am a writer usually the first question I get is: "Where do you get your ideas?" I think every writer has to answer this but the problem is ideas are so indefinable and elusive they seem to come from nowhere, yet everywhere. I guess I could say, "Well, most of my ideas come from IdeaMart. It's a bit like WalMart and you get usually get them ten to a pack, heavily discounted." Some who have read my work might even think that's the real answer! Hmmm... But the turth is, ideas are everywhere, in anything that inspires you or in whatever arouses some emotion within. Take music, for example. Many of my ideas are inspired by song titles, or a piece of lyric (ofttimes misheard) in a particular tune. I have found entire novels have sprung right from one line in a song. For instance, I have a short story called Cassandra in my Dark Harbors Horror/Fantasy anthology. Most folks automatically think of the mythological figure who predicted things people refused to believe. In a way they'd be right, but indirectly. It actually came from an more obscure ABBA song by the same title (which was loosely based on the myth gal, hence the indirect link). The story is a modern horror twist on the old myth, but it sprang from a song title, because at the time I actually had not read the myth. The same is true of another tale in that book called The Fisherman. It was originally a George Baker Selection song (a Dutch group Americans may only be familiar with through the songs Paloma Blanca and Little Green Bag).

The moral to the story? If you are looking for ideas--don't look. Let them come. Listen to your favorite music and be open to inspiration!