Goodreads asked Paul Michael Peters:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Paul Michael Peters “Insensible Loss” came to me in an instant. The outline of the plot, how to tell the story, and where it would take the reader. In a 24 hour period of time I had listened to the podcast of A Way With Words http://www.waywordradio.org/insensibl... when one of the hosts Martha Barnette describes a wilderness training course. I read a writing prompt offered as part of a writer’s suggestion on Reddit that posed the idea for a quest about the fountain of youth. Finally, I watched a documentary about the future. They described that hospitals in the future would look more like airports do today than what we have considered a traditional hospital.

I can’t tell you which order these things happened. I can tell you that when Martha Barnette described the “the things that seep out of your life that you once depended on” was a thought that stuck in my head.

Unlike the first two stories I published, “Peter in Flight” and “The Symmetry of Snowflakes”, which were more personal and drawn on ideas that had bubbled in me for decades, “Insensible Loss” just came to me in a flash. It was very similar to several of the stories in “Mr. Memory”, quick and fast. Unlike the short stories, “Insensible Loss” had a clear arc of story line, the characters that needed to be in it to advance the plot, and a good sense of the complexity the story would need to be told.

Because of this instant sense of the story, I dropped the current work I was half way through, “American Appetite” and quickly cranked out a first draft for “Insensible Loss”. This was reviewed by my first round editor Steven Bauer http://www.hollowtreeliterary.com/ who had great feedback on the shape and direction. After a third Draft I sent this to JERA Publishing and worked with the lovely and talented Brooke Payne http://www.self-pub.net/ for three rounds of reviews and crafting.

I am very pleased with the story. If you consider the work from “Peter in Flight” to “Insensible Loss”, and all the story writing that has gone unpublished, I can see the progress in how I am growing. This is very satisfying for me as an author. Yes, I hope people will read this work, and enjoy it. Still, I remain selfish in the the satisfaction of completing a work, I can only share the end results to the reader, not the daily efforts endured.

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