Amalie Hansen asked Marjorie DeLuca:

What inspires you?

Marjorie DeLuca As a writer you're constantly on the lookout for ideas and inspiration strikes in the most random ways. For example, I was browsing through cover designs one day and I saw the image that's now on the cover of LILAH. A question sprung into my mind - Why would a young woman in a wedding dress be running through the snow? The answer to that became the romantic suspense novel, LILAH. In the case of my historical novels, they're usually inspired by a fascinating person or incident in history. THE PITMAN'S DAUGHTER was inspired by my mother's memories of life on a street of miners' houses. THE SAVAGE INSTINCT was inspired by my reading about the life and trial of Mary Anne Cotton, a notorious poisoner from my own home town in England. I knew I didn't want to write novel about her, but I wanted to write about the impact the case had on Victorian society, in particular women who were extremely repressed. I asked myself, how would a woman, struggling with the after effects of a miscarriage and living with a controlling husband, come to terms with the graphic details contained in the newspapers at the time about a woman who dared to kill her own husbands and her children and stepchildren? And what if this woman lived in the same town and was able to gain access to Mary Ann Cotton in prison? I merged fact with fiction and the novel was born! In the case of A CREATURE OF FANCY, I read a fascinating written in the 19th century called "The Lady's Dressing Room" - all about how to be a healthy and respectable young lady and full of tips about skin care, staying slim, keeping clean etc. From reading that I imagined a scenario about the Victorian beauty business and a young girl who unwittingly becomes involved in a business that claims to transform plain young women into marriageable beauties. With my YA sci-fi trilogy, I used a "what if" question to inspire me. What if we could genetically engineer humans to stay young forever? The answer to that became the Forevers (Forever Ones). The consequences of such a discovery are the ideas that fuel the book. I imagined that there would be massive conflict between big corporations, big government and big crime to control the technology, so the story is about the young people (forevers) who try to break free and escape this conflict. Other stories can be inspired by something you see while you're out shopping or even something that someone says. One example of this was when I was out walking with my friend and her dog. I noticed how many people stopped to chat and talk about her dog. I then thought, well what if young single women used dog walking as a way to meet cute guys? And so my novel-in-progress, THE DOG WALKERS DATING CLUB was born. A short story I wrote called DOLL'S EYES was inspired by my son. When he was a little boy he had an Ernie doll. One morning he asked me to take it out of his room because "he didn't like the way it was looking at him"! So you see, there are many ways to get inspiration!

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