Inner Spark, Outer Spark

 

I have two new stories in anthologies and they make a nice contrast in answering the age-old question: Where do you get your ideas?

For instance, I was biking one day and saw a phone lying in the street.  It was still functional but it was locked and there was no way to contact the owner.  I put up a message on NextDoor and got no response.

Eventually I brought it to the local shop of the service that ran the phone.  I don't know whether they cracked the code and contacted the author or cannibalized it for parts, or just chucked it in the trash, but I had done all I could do.

Except.

A Nurse Log (National Park Service) 

I could write a story about it.  "The Nurse Log" appears in Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy: Thirteen Tales of Murder, Mystery, and Master Detection, edited by Gay Toltl Kinman, and Andrew McAleer.

It's about a somewhat eccentric biker who finds a phone on a road and tries to contact the owner.  Turns out the device is connected to a crime and he winds up stuck in the middle.

I would call this story the result of an inner spark.  I was reacting to something that I experienced.

Sometime after I wrote that story I received a call from Colin Conway.  He writes police novels set in Spokane and has edited three anthologies, with each story and set in Spokane.

He asked if I would like to write a story for his fourth anthology.  Each tale would involve someone finding a gun (always the same gun), using it in a crime, and then leaving it somewhere where someone else could find it.

Spokane Convention Center

 I thought that was intriguing and wrote back that I would try if he would agree to two points. 1) I had only been to Spokane once and that was for the World Science Fiction Conference, so I would focus my story on the Spokane Conference Center. 2) I wanted to avoid the obvious gun-related crimes (shooting or threatening to shoot someone).  

Colin approved my plan.  The result was ""The Book Deal," a story about a publishing conference and two editors dueling over a new book my a hot influencer.  it is now available in Lost and Loaded: A Gun's Tale. 

So that is an example of an external inspiration: Someone other than me suggested the topic for the story.  

I prefer the internal ones, since they tend to be close to my heart.  But it can be fun to work from another writer's suggestion.  And hey, it's nice to be wanted. 

Afternote: I have since found two more cell phones.  In neither case could I get them back to the owner.