Who, What, Where, When and How?

Many people ask how an author comes up with the story lines we write.  Some of mine come from bits and pieces of conversations I hear.  A few develop off tangents of ideas I read in news articles or personal experience.  I read different genre as well as what I write, paranormal and erotic romance.

 My recent release, Hot for Torrey, came from a discussion on friends with benefits and the younger generation as well as generation X hooking up more.  I often listen to music as I write and my favorite group is Blue Sky Riders.  Their song Little Victories inspired Holt and Torrey’s second chance at love story. 

One thing that needs to be taken into account is letting your muse take you places and ask questions that sometimes you might find wacky or outside your comfort zone.  Once the questions start rolling you often can find a scenes or scenarios that intrigue you or percolate into characters and/or settings demanding their story be told.   My first book, Red Hot, came from a fellow author talking about a novella she was writing for an anthology call on firemen.  Brent and Bunny’s story went more than novella length and became my person catharsis to post 9/11 in many ways. 

Since mash-ups and cross-genre came on the scene, I’ve taken ideas from science fiction stories I’ve read and enjoyed, let them marinate in my muse’s juices and given them my own spin by twisting them with paranormal aspects.  It doesn’t always work.  Sometimes the outcome is as interesting as the journey.  

 I blog weekly at Shape Shifter Seductions.  My blog mates and I have come up with our own town of shape shifters.  We run flash pieces on them most days.  While others we have guest authors happen by as well as our own promo when we have new releases.  We enjoy the blog hops we participate in which gives us an idea to focus on as a theme and we go from there.  I’ve taken a few of our citizens from our shape shifter town and moved them up to Alaska.  The two triads are fun to write about.    Sharing our creative drives together allows the five of us (my blog mates and I) to use each other’s characters in our flashes and see our characters grow or find out new things about them. 

If a story line from a favorite movie, childhood cartoon, current program, or other books ignites your juices to tell the story from your view with unique and different characters go for it.  Remember plagiarism and stealing story ideas is theft. So be careful and write new and your story that we can all enjoy as much as you enjoyed the ones we authors have already written.

Solara Gordon

Romance with a Spicy Kick!