Out of thin air

When I was at the gym yesterday working out on the EFX, I was listening to my iPod, as usual. Every now and then something catches my attention on one of the TV monitors suspended over the workout area and I’ll watch. If it’s really interesting, I may unplug my headphones and patch into the TV audio receiver mounted on the EFX.

What caught my eye was fairly mundane—a scene from a crime show. But it did something to me, and as soon as I got near a piece of paper and a pen I wrote down about a page and a half that will be the beginning of a new story some day. I don’t know where the story will go. I don’t know who the main character is. The point of view is different from anything I’ve written before. The words entered my head as loudly as if someone standing behind me had spoken them to me. I knew I had to capture them. Just wish I knew what I was going to do with them!

Then, this morning, as I was waking up, I found myself wondering what I would write about for my next Storytellers Unplugged essay. Within a few minutes I had come up with the theme and a bunch of examples to support my thesis. Again, I had to scramble for a scrap of paper and a writing implement to get it all down.

If I could bottle the type of inspiration that comes out of thin air, I’d be a wealthy man, I think.

Speaking of wealth, I received my payment notification for my Rue Morgue article in #73. Non-fiction is terrific. None of this 5 cents per word stuff. If I could turn off the voices in my head that tell me all these story ideas, I think I could make a good supplementary income writing non-fiction.

Another rejection letter yesterday. This one was for an HWA anthology, and I had high hopes for the story. I really like it, though I realized that it skirted the edges of the anthology’s theme, so I was saddened to see it didn’t make the grade. This one is long enough that the number of potential markets is limited, and almost all of them are postal submission markets, so I’m going to wait until the weekend to get it back into circulation.