Random Musings

In one of my Facebook groups, another writer posed the question, “How do you draw your inspiration for your stories?” The answers ran the gamut. I posted: “My best ideas come while lingering far too long in the shower.”

This is 100% true. I am a bathroom-inspired genius, in part because this is what I see out my bathroom window:
There’s a fog; it’s early AM; I live in the Pacific Northwest where it’s typically gloomy this time of year. Ghostly would be another apt description, but more on that later.

As I gaze out, I often wonder what lives in that wildlife habitat. I hear coyotes at night, and I’ve seen deer before, but I’m not really out in the country per se, just lucky to butt up against a wisp of nature.

Now, I’m not claiming that everything conceived in the bathroom has life outside the bathroom or even lives up to its initial hype, just that my bathroom is a petri dish for ideas.

I also tend to notice oddities like this leaf I saw suspended by a few spider web filaments. It survived the entire day dangling in the parking lot over one of the spots reserved for Evergreen Health Care, so I had to snap a picture:
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Once I snapped a photo in my brand new (at the time) house and my sister helpfully pointed out that I had orbs. That took my imagination in a whole new direction. To this day, there’s something a little creepy about my basement, more so the guest bedroom than my workout room (pictured), though I must have the TV going at all times, either with my DVD workout playing or something mindless like QVC.

So with those types of photos / experiences, you’d think I’d write horror. I don’t. I can, but I prefer other genres. Most of the time.

Sometimes a kernel of an idea will implant from sights like these, or a song, or a story I hear. Over time, the idea germinates and takes off. Maybe it grows into a full tree, maybe it’s merely a sprig of cilantro or mint for spicing up a bigger dish.

When I do flash fiction, the conception of a story idea under the pressure of a ticking clock is quite an adrenalin rush. While my stories haven’t always been that well polished in the rush to get them down within the 90 minutes (and I’m usually finished in closer to 60 minutes because I hate to edit), the stories themselves stick with me in a good way.

So, this AM, I’m sitting down to take one of those 500 word acorns to see if I can grow it into something bigger for an anthology, something closer to 5000 to 10,000 words. I may need to take a long shower or go workout in my haunted gym first…but I’ll get it down. I pitched my idea to the Silverback this morning before we hauled out of bed for the day. He was either humoring me because he liked my idea or was buttering me up for [[censored]], but he responded favorably. 😉

So how about you? Where, when and how do your best ideas come to you for problem solving, story writing, artwork, whatever?

My name is Claire and I am a NaNo Nerd.

((WELCOME CLAIRE!!))

It starts as an obsession with numbers, specifically a 5 followed by 4 zeros. 50,000 words in 30 days, which is 1667 words per day on average if you use the full 30 days of November, the 11th month of the 11th year of the millenium. (OK please don’t correct me and point out it’s the 12th year because 2000 was the first, just play along with me here.)

I like to track my stats. I love the word count widgets (taps toe waiting impatiently for the NaNo site to roll out the official NaNo widget for us). For me, that’s part of the allure of NaNo–the sense of achievement when that published goal is met.

Behold exhibit A as of 6:30 AM 11/8 and ignore the small color coding error, which has since been fixed:

Yes, it’s an Excel spreadsheet. Yes, it’s color-coded. I also tried to get the conditional formatting to work on the daily total column to put any day less than 1667 in bad girl red but Excel for the Mac is different than Excel for the PC and I’m a recent Mac convert. I let it go for the time being, though not without a niggle of chagrin.

I am a numbers gal as I’ve stated many times on this blog. I convert most goals to metrics which makes NaNoWriMo my kind of challenge. My word meter at NaNoWriMo.org is always updated before I go to bed, sometimes multiple times per day.

Progress feedback is good. I wished all aspects of writing were quantifiable. Can you imagine if the quality of books was as precisely quantifiable?

We could go far beyond the crude five-star rating systems for reviews. Bestsellers would be based in part on the “Dewey-Times Index” or the DTI (I made that up). We’d deduct points for flaws in grammar, character development, originality, logic. We’d include degree of difficulty multipliers. Starving writers would compare their DTI’s and hire coaches to help them improve their scores.

One difficulty of the DTI would be preventing the East German judge from colluding with the Soviet judge. Those of you who remember the Olympics of the seventies and eighties will understand my joke. Those born after that time, East Germany and the USSR are former countries…well, never mind.

But I digress, as I often do. Points off my blog post for doing that.

Sounds like a draconian nightmare for both readers and writers doesn’t it? I was just lamenting to a writer friend the other day saying, “I wish there were easy answers (on the right way to write), but sometimes the existence of the ambiguity is all that gives me hope, ya know?”

But that doesn’t mean I can’t nor shouldn’t measure the non-creative and objective parts of writing and reading. There certainly is a work ethic involved in transferring ideas to paper (electronic or tangible). So carry on with pride, you spreadsheeters! Keep databases to track your reads and/or your writes–your overall quantity, your pace, the percent make up of your choices by genre. Just don’t let the numbers overshadow the story cause whether it’s told in 50,000 or 50 words, it’s always the story that counts most.