In Response to Last Month's Contest: Where Do The Ideas Come From?

I asked for ideas in my newsletter for my blog, which gets sadly neglected.

Here's the first one:

On your blog you can talk about where a writer's ideas come from and how you go about setting this on paper.Joy

Nora Roberts is famous for cringing when she gets that question. I can't cringe because no one ever asks me. I think they're afraid.

The answer is that I have no clue. I'm pretty sure that often they come from conversations I have with people that sort of merge together in my brain and come oozing up in some mutant form. Sometimes I get an idea from a scene in my head that springs up and won't go away. I love coming up with titles and trying to think of a story to go with them, but I always forget those stories...usually because I think of them while driving and they're long gone by the time I get to anywhere I can record them. My last stories started with me thinking about why the heck do people like werewolf and vamp stories? I wasn't too interested until I started to think about pack hierarchy with wolves. That interested me and I took off with it because if humans are willing to be dominated, there has to be a reason. Now if they're half-canine and half-human--that's a twist.