Rainy Days and Mondays

Good morning. It’s a rainy day Monday. Rain always makes me feel like writing.

I’d like to start today talking about the questions that came in the most last week. “Where do your ideas come from?”

I wish I knew. The truth is sometimes I can’t really place when an idea first drifted into my brain.

Maybe from a song, or one line from a movie, or maybe just something someone said to me. It’s like a seed that starts growing. Sometimes ideas come from playing the ‘what if’ game. What if a woman wrote as a dime novelist under a man’s name? What if a pregnant widow landed on the cost of Texas with no one to help her? What if a family believed they could dream their future? Once an idea starts growing it’s like a movie playing in the back of my mind. I drift back and watch it now and then until one day, I can’t leave. I have to see it through. When that happens, I start writing because I want to see what happens.

Now, to work. I’ve been looking forward to today for a week. I’m stepping back into the past and working on my historical. I’ve been away from it for a few weeks, so I’ll start from the first and read. Rainy days and reading—life is good.