One of the questions that writers are most often asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

A few months ago I watched Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass (highly recommend!). What he said is something that I absolutely agree with, which is that our minds are open to ideas constantly. He has this concept that everything he absorbs goes in the “compost heap”, and sooner or later, wildflowers sprout. I agree.

I read a lot. Not necessarily books, although now that I am in the self-publishing industry, I am reading more often, both other writers’ work and business books. I take in information from all kinds of sources. I especially love to read about science, particularly space exploration. I dream about writing a sci-fi opera someday.

I also listen to people. I love to talk, because I’m extremely extraverted, but I do really love listening to people. The social app Clubhouse has been a wealth of knowledge for me. Just yesterday I was hosting one of my twice-weekly reading rooms, and this cool guy Dave dropped in. He’s a truck driver, and he’s often on the road 14-16 hours, overnight. He wants to write a screenplay, so he had tons of questions about that. But when he was describing what it was like to drive all night and have his imagination going, I got this image in my mind of his truck’s big windshield becoming a sort of screen onto which all of his thoughts were being projected, and this idea came to be about what would happen if he manifested those thoughts into reality and drove his 18-wheeler smack into one of his stories. I get little visions all the time like that.

My readers tell me all the time that my writing is super visual. With my new novel, Mermaid of Venice, they say things like, “Oh, this is such a movie!” or “I kept picturing this in my head as a TV show.” I love it when what I see in my mind’s eye gets transferred to the page and then zapped into the brains of my readers. Sometimes I do wish we had mental projectors, so I could see what concepts look like to other people.

I have this odd phenomenon in my head in which I picture numbers as being huge. It’s quite distracting, actually, and made it very difficult to do math as a kid. I kept seeing “7” like an enormous sign at a 7/11. 7 is silver, and it rotates. Anyway, that’s one example of how my kooky little mind works.

Before we go, I wanted to give you a quick reminder to buy your copy of Mermaid of Venice today!

What do you find inspiring in your own life?