Howdy Freeholders,

I thought this week I’d regale you with the answer to another question I get fairly often:

“How do you come up with these wild story ideas?”

I answered this sort of in another post, but I figured I’d give you some specific examples this time.

I tell you what: it ain’t easy having an imagination as fertile as mine.  I mean, really, Lady Inspiration is constantly hitting me — or smacking me upside the head when I’m a little too obtuse to pay attention to her 24/7.  Yup, she keeps me busy, whether I’m awake or asleep.

In fact, about the only time there’s not story ideas or “what if” floating around in my head is when I’m sleeping. And even then, dreams sometimes work their way through my subconscious to become story ideas filed “for later.” You can read about that in another post I wrote: Dreams: A Subconscious Writing Resource.

Alea Jacta Est, for instance, was inspired by the blackout that hit New York City and greater New England back in 2003.  I wouldn’t have paid overly-much attention to it — I was living in Florida at the time — except for two things I heard repeated ad nausuem in the Press:

(1) The near-immediate protestations by city government in NYC that the blackout was not the result of an act of terrorism. Remarkably, they were unequivocal in also stating in the same breath that they weren’t sure what caused the sudden, catastrophic, regional-wide power loss. “We have no idea why this happened, but we know for sure it wasn’t terrorism, so everyone chill.”   My instant response to the TV was if they don’t know what caused this mess (understandable since it was only an hour into the crisis), how the hell can you say what didn’t cause it?   But not a single reporter asked that question, then (or later), that I ever saw. [1]

(2) the media began explaining how a single outage somewhere in Upstate New York caused a ripple effect that overloaded transformers and continued the train of power outages along the New England Grid.  They even had some cool dramatic music and bright graphics showing the different regional power grids in the country and how Texas was relatively insulated if one or all of the other grids collapse.

I can still remember sitting there on the couch, cold Diet Coke in hand, watching the news through half-closed eyelids when I saw that graphic on the screen.  My eyes snapped open — Lady Inspiration had slapped me in the face!

Then she spoke to me: “What if a terrorist was sitting out there somewhere watching this same show…would the info that Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and the other alphabet soup channels were broadcasting give them an idea on how to attack our national power grids?  I mean, come on — that reporter just smugly announced that if one grid were to completely fail (as it came close to doing that night in 2003) it would in theory take down all the others, except for Texas (remember how I mentioned it was separate from the rest of the nation?). “

The reporter continued to explain how the chaos that was feared in NYC would most definitely happen if the entire country went dark….

And in my mind, right then and there, Hakim was born, sitting in front of the TV watching the news, drinking a Diet Coke beer and formulating a plan to cripple the United States…

Or, take for example, Apache Dawn.  This time, I envisioned something more sinister and far reaching than a mere power outage: bio-warfare.  What made me think of a story revolving around that? If you want to read more about the inspiration for the Wildfire Series, I’ve posted the Inspiration behind the Wildfire Saga. It came eerily close to the Pandemic of 2020, but I wrote it ten years earlier.

Typically what happens is I see something or imagine something, an event that at the time is relatively harmless such as the blackout in 2003, some scientists arguing over whether to publish results about forcing the bird flu to mutate, a massive coronal mass ejection that missed our planet by a few days…etc., and simply sit back and think, what if it didn’t turn out the way it did in real life? Instead of missing us, what if that big solar storm in 2012 had actually smacked us? What if those scientists who wanted to publish the results of their experiment had succeeded and terrorists found out?

From there, my imagination runs wild and the bodies start to pile up.

And trust me, there is no lack of crazy ideas floating around out there in the media. I actually have to limit the time I scan the headlines or my “Story Ideas” note in Obsidian might turn into a book on its own!

Anyway, until next time my friends, keep your heads down and your powder dry, because we live in interesting times.

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Notes

[1]: Turns out the mayor was right — a squirrel chewed through a line or a branch fell on a line or some other innocuous event caused all the trouble…but we didn’t know that for some time.