Goodreads asked Deborah Cullins Smith:

How do you get inspired to write?

Deborah Cullins Smith Most of my work has come from writing prompts I got in The Herscher Project. But inspiration might come from a movie or another book -- not plagiaristic of course! Maybe it's a phrase or a character from history. In one story, (unpublished) I had been watching Braveheart with Mel Gibson. After the battle of Falkirk, women walked the fields to look for their kin. That captured my imagination, so I wrote about a young Scottish woman who finds her beloved on that field. But the other women around her are scandalized because her love was an English soldier. She is ostracized for loving someone from "the other side". For "The Matron", my inspiration came from the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula. I'll let you decide just how that inspiration came about! Sometimes it's about pulling off a twist -- you think the villain is "this" person, but it really turns out to be someone else entirely!

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