Where Writers Ideas Come From

  People are always asking authors where they get their ideas. In my experience this varies with each writer and each piece of writing. With me, ideas seem to come from the oddest things, usually something a little peculiar or strange that I encounter. For example, in my humorous   fantasy White Queen, Black Knight, there is a scene where Dorian, the protagonist, enters a tunnel marked with the words "Dead Man's Tunnel" and a skull and crossbones. Well, I used to travel a road that went under a railroad bridge. Because it was also a curve and the road was narrowed to one lane, many head-on collisions occurred when a car entered it from each end at the same time. As a result, someone had placed graffiti in the tunnel in large bold letters, "Dead Man's Curve" with a skull and crossbones beneath it. That gave me an idea for a character who must travel through a tunnel marked in such a manner. I thought, Perhaps my hero is lost, maybe he was enchanted by a sorcerer to always head in the wrong direction. This thought gave me Dorian, a naive youth, who on his way to a tournament to win the hand of a princess is enchanted by evil sorcerer Mordrake to cause Dorian to always take the wrong path.

My Morgaine Series of eBooks started while listening to that old seventies hit, Dancing in the Moonlight. I pictured the scene, a moonlit clearing in the woods and odd people, Wiccans perhaps, dancing in the moonlight. I thought, what if an ordinary woman should come upon such a scene. I wanted to make it a supernatural romance, so I decided that the love interest would be an immortal sorcerer posing as a psychic, and the woman who falls in love with him would be an ordinary woman. Of course, there had to be a rival, which was a witch, Morgaine. Then I got to thinking, if the sorcerer was immortal, sooner or later he would have to disappear since he would not age. In another novel of the series, I had him go missing. His love, of course, hired a private investigator to find him. In another novel in the series, I got to wondering how Morgaine became a witch. I also saw a picture of little men attending a university of magic. I had Morgaine step into that picture to learn to be a sorceress. In another of the series, I got my inspiration from The Book of Revelations in the Bible. My protagonists had to stop an impending apocalypse.

Ideas can come from anywhere. All it takes is a little imagination to transfer something mundane or unusual into a scene, which in turn translates into characters (to be in the scene), background and an event. One thing leads to another, and soon you have story or a novel.

Explaining the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve has been in the news lately. Berneke, its head, has said that it is going to act to increase employment. Few people know exactly what the Federal Reserve is and what it does. I found the answer to these questions in a book called Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. This is a direct quote from the book.

"The Federal Reserve made it possible for other banks to loan what they didn't have. The Fed "guaranteed" the credit of other banks.

The Fed was able to make this guarantee because it had a lot of credit itself, in the form of government bonds.

The government bonds were good because they were guaranteed by loans from the Fed.

The loans from the Fed were guaranteed because the government gave them bonds.

And this was safe because the bonds (remember) were guaranteed by the Fed."

As you can see by the above, it is all smoke and mirrors. The people at the Fed are magicians who make scads of money out of nothing. And that explains a lot about how are economy works.

Making a Short Story into a Novel

Making a Short Story into a Novel

Recently I decided that a short story I had written could be expanded into novel length or at least a novella. Once I had accomplished that bit of work, I could submit it to my publisher to release it as an E-book. The story was a modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty – with a twist ending.

Here is a brief synopsis: a young man of college age takes co-ed of his acquaintance on a trip to New England to browse through antique stores. His hidden motive is to seduce her. While browsing through an antique store, the proprietor talks him into buying a small ornate wooden box. When he opens the box, he finds an old-fashioned iron key. His attempts at seduction fail miserably. When they return to the campus, she begins to see the star of the football team. Heartbroken, our hero goes on a guided tour of some Eastern Europe countries, including Romania where his ancestors originated. He leaves the tour to visit the village where his relatives live. On a hill overlooking the hamlet is a ruined castle. He is told that it is forbidden to go there. He has a dream that a sleeping beauty lies there. Determined to see what is really in the castle, he disobeys his uncle and heads for the castle, but finds it surrounded by a thick poisonous thorn hedge. By using a chain saw he makes his way through the hedge and enters the castle. What he finds there is my secret. You'll have to buy the E-book when it comes out if you're interested. All of this is told in the first person POV. The published version is entitled "The Sleeper."

The first thing I did to convert it to novel length is divide it into chapters, making each scene a separate chapter. Now, in a short story, pretty much all we know about the characters is what their action reveal about them. So I beefed up the main characters, giving background information and other detail about them. I had to do this without slowing the pace of the story too much.

Next I added new scenes. Where in the short story I might've had a sentence that simply made a statement about something that occurred simply to move the story along, I invented an entire scene to show everything that happened in detail.

Then I beefed up information about the locations and other background and environmental factors. Since part of the story was set on a tour of Eastern Europe, which I had also experienced, it was relatively easy to fill in detail about the places the protagonist visited during his trip.

By this time I had added a fair amount of wordage to the original story. As I edited for grammar and errors, I also found many places where I could beef the narrative and added a lot of enhancements of mood, imagery and foreshadowing.

All in all, it turned out fairly well. I raised the word count from five thousand words to a novella of over twenty thousand. This made it eligible for publishing as an E-book by my publisher. The published e-book is entitled "The Sleeper."