I never know when it’s going to happen.
It might happen while I’m working. It might happen while I’m driving. It might happen when I’m sitting somewhere doing absolutely nothing.
An idea simply appears.
And once it does, I can’t leave it alone.
I turn it over. I twist it. I look at it from the other side. Sometimes I turn it completely upside down.
And somewhere along the way, something happens.
That ordinary little idea becomes something extraordinary.
That’s when writing gets fun.
No, I take that back. Writing gets fun the moment that idea hits me. It’s like a tank running through my mind. And the best part of it is, every now and again that tank fires off a round that blows me away.
That’s what I do with ideas. I take something ordinary, sometimes something I’ve seen in the news, and start asking, “What if?”
I might see something in the news about how a psychic helped the police catch a killer. Then I say to myself, “Psychics can see the future. But what if they could only hear the future?”
When someone sees something, they’re using their vision. But what if I isolated one of the other senses instead? What if someone could only hear the future?
And that’s where my book, Sounds of Tomorrow, came from. In it, Jessi can ‘hear’ the sounds of traumatic events 24 hours before they happen, and guess what.
She hears a murder!
And suddenly, one little twist on an ordinary idea has taken me somewhere completely unexpected.
Once I start thinking about how I can twist or turn something we see every day and make it into something we’ve never looked at before, the fun really kicks in!
I love taking the ordinary and turning it into the extraordinary. Something that you don’t expect. Something that, when you read it, makes you stop and think twice, maybe even read it again.
That’s where the fun is.
And that’s when it begins to feel like traveling to a new destination. The excitement, the thrill of getting there, and wondering what you’ll see.
Except with writing, sometimes I don’t just get to visit the destination.
Sometimes I get to create it.
And sometimes, that journey takes me much farther than I ever expected. Entire universes, or at least, galaxies.
That’s what happened with my Tokorel series. It’s become an entire galaxy in its own section of the universe. And the best part is, it’s still growing!
That’s another thing I love about writing. It lets me go places that don’t exist anywhere else.
I can visit Another Land. I can travel to Khizara. I can wander through the galaxy I’ve created for Tokorel. I can create people, places and situations that exist nowhere in the real world, and for a while, they become very real to me.
And then I get to invite someone else in. Come on. Let me show you what I found!
Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on this long. But writing excites me to the point where I almost can’t stop talking about it.
And if that isn’t love, true love, I don’t know what is.