Origins

 “Who knows where thoughts come from, they just appear.”  -Lucas from Empire Records

Over the last year or so, I’ve had some people ask me where I got the idea for my current book, Jac and the City of 1,000 Worlds? What was the inspiration behind a 7th grade girl going on an unintentional journey to Meridian, a city at the center of 1,000 different worlds?

I don’t know.

For a good number of my stories, I’ve been able to find–at times odd–reasoning behind the spark of my ideas.

Many ideas have been due to a direct influence from already published works by my favorite authors. Neil Gaiman‘s novel Neverwhere and The Sandman series were huge influences in many of the stories I wrote 10 or more years ago, as was Warren Ellis and his graphic novel series, Transmetropolitan. And 15 years ago I was introduced to Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. While I knew Disney’s film adaptation of the book, I had never known the brilliance of Bradbury’s writing.

At times it’s been a result of statements that I or others have made. The creative seed for a comic series I wrote almost 20 years ago was something along the lines of me saying, “Wouldn’t it suck to have your hand bitten off by a demon?” And from there, my first completed project, CHANCE, was born.

I suppose I do know where my thoughts come from, at least in a creative sense. Perhaps the ideas were bits from a dream that slipped into the waking world. Perhaps they come from the world around me and I piece ideas and images together which then slide into my mind.  Whatever the origin of a story is from, I’m blessed to be able to cultivate them into a work of fiction.

But, getting back to the original question posed at the beginning of this post, I must say in this particular instance, the original idea that gave birth to Jac and her incredible adventure was this:

I have no idea.

But I love it.

Stay tuned.

Cheers.