Let’s start this off with an apology.  I didn’t post anything on my blog last week.  I’m new to the blog world and I’m already slacking.  The truth is…I’ve been working so hard finishing up a screenplay that I lost all track of my social media duties.  Even my Tweets have been lame over the last week.  I’ve been re-tweeting other people’s tweets so as to keep up the appearance that I’m still actively tweeting.  Or maybe I just didn’t have anything interesting to say.  But I’m back now.  The screenplay is finished.  So, to the handful of followers out there (and the spammers who keep sending me weird comments in odd truncated, quasi-English sentences from domain names that may or may not be from another solar system), I’m sorry.  Anyway, I thought I’d talk briefly about the most popular question for any writer, the question I get from every book club I’ve ever visited: Where do your ideas come from?

The short answer is, and I mean this most sincerely, my brain.  Sometimes they just pop in there and I can’t explain why.  The long answer is more complicated, but I’ll give it a shot.  First of all—and I didn’t come up with this, someone much more intelligent probably did—I don’t go looking for stories.  I stumble upon them.  They find me, in a way.  I do what any writer worth their salt should do—I observe and listen to PEOPLE—because without interesting characters there is no story.

Using the manuscripts and half-manuscripts in my office as examples—there’s several in there that I’ve finished and never tried to publish (yet), and a few more that I’ve started but never finished (yet)—and the ideas were born in many different ways.  One idea came from watching an episode of the Geraldo Rivera Show a hundred years ago about multiple personality disorders.  That spurred me to write a thriller I titled, Eyes in the Darkness.  Unseen Enemy, a thriller/suspense novel, came to me after seeing a framed photograph of a cabin in the woods, surrounded by snow.  One of the cabin’s windows was lit.  The premise started churning.  My movie, 2nd Serve, came to me from daily experiences inside various tennis clubs.  I came up with the idea for the book, Highway 62, on one of my many trips to Madison, IN several years ago, traveling that two-lane road.  I came up with The Book of Jonah after seeing a painting in a museum and then reading about the 1937 Louisville flood.  Savannah’s Burning popped into my head on one of our carriage tours of the unique city.  For The Strange Case of Isaac Crawley…I actually came up with the title first, and then decided to breathe life into the main character, Isaac Crawley.  The Book of Julia came to me after reading about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the buried city of Pompeii.  The idea for another screenplay, From Weed-2-Seed, came about over lunch with Gill Holland, discussing the topic of…food.  As far as A White Wind Blew, I’ve always been fascinated with Waverly Hills.  I visited the old tuberculosis sanatorium several years ago wanting to write something scary, because, at the time, that’s what the place was for me—a place about ghosts.  But when I got there, I was blown away by the size and architecture of the building, and knew right away that the story needed to be historical.  I owed that to the thousands of people who died there so many years ago from tuberculosis—the white death.  I stood on the fourth floor solarium porch, looking out over the woods and said to myself, “What if this place is haunted…and I am surrounded by ghosts…what is their story?”  I then heard the naked boughs of the trees clicking in a breeze that whistled around the angles of the boomerang-shaped building, and it sounded like a song.  I imagined the sound of a violin, and then a piano, and the story was born.  They lived in fear every time the white wind blew…