“Where do you get your ideas from?” is a pretty common question, so I thought I’d go back and reminisce a bit about what made each of my published works happen in the first place. Those first sparks, if you will.
I’m even going to go into how they strayed from the original ideas on some of them, because… why not?
Empeddigo - Man, this is digging back in the old days. I remember having two main basic ideas when I was developing this story: a fantasy/science fiction genre mashup, and an infectious disease. I definitely didn’t pull things off as well as I’d hoped, but to be totally honest… I haven’t read the book in a decade and a half. I remember very few of the details. I could probably only name three characters from it.
The Trials of Hallac - This is my epic poem, and a lot of my inspiration came from the format of other epic poems. Naturally, one of the main influences was The Odyssey. I’ve been a fan of Greek mythology since I was ten years old or so, and I took Latin in high school, so even the Romanized side of things was on my radar for a long time. Mostly the narrative technique of in media res affected me here, as well as the idea of there being certain specific, self-contained segments. The syllable-count system affecting the format was somewhat inspired by basic numeroulogy, but more from numerical symbolism across some faith systems. Like 3 and 7 being “lucky” or “holy” numbers, and therefore being the syllable counts spoken by deities, for example.
Plot-wise, it was strongly inspired by generalized fantasy gaming. The monsters and incidents were pretty basic in that regard. The main character’s familial conflicts were ripped pretty much straight out of Final Fantasy Tactics, with the main character being the third son and the only one born to a non-noble mother and therefore seen as less than his brothers.
Mere Acquaintances - So this story was really a project on writing vs editing and sticking to your guns. The nature of the project was to release it serially, much in the way authors like Charles Dickens published some of his works bit-by-bit in the newspaper. Mere Acquaintances was supposed to be something I never got to edit, a literal first draft novel put out as a sort of “don’t compare your first draft to someone’s finished product” kind of thing. There is a ton wrong with this project, and like Empeddigo, I doubt I could tell you much about it now other than what I remember. I haven’t read it in ages.
Starsigns - Now we’re getting into the books I definitely remember better. Starsigns went through a lot of changes from its first inception. The initial idea was “the boy who could speak fairy” and that whole idea came from my local renaissance faire. I’ve been going every year since 1999 (except for 2020 and 2021 - thanks Covid) so I’m super familiar with it. Well, we have an awesome gaggle of fairies who work the faire, and they have a certain high-pitched, somewhat bubble-throaty way of speaking. Think something like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, but more garbled. Anyway, it’s a voice I can easily do, so I’ve been “speaking fluent fairy” for ages and seeing people who can’t do it or who barely understand the fairies themselves gave me the idea of there being only one person known who can understand them.
Add in inspiration from Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings and even more from her Soldier Son Trilogy and… yeah, that was the basis for the book.
Like I said, it went through a lot of changes. The main character’s name was originally Kerr and he was one of like 7 or 8 siblings, mostly boys. He was the only one without a prescribed fate and was therefore considered sort of… extra. To the point the working title for the book for a very long time was “The Extra Son.” Well, Kerr turned to Cair, and his many siblings got pared down/combined into a set of boy-girl twins. The book was planned to span a few years, from Kerr’s early teens to his early twenties maybe. Cair’s story spans a few weeks at most. There’s no pirate storyline like I originally had planned. Hell, in the original plots, there was no Almo, and… I don’t think there was a Tivory, even.
In all honestly, I think Starsigns came out better than The Extra Son would have as originally planned, and I say that while still having some dissatisfaction over how Starsigns turned out!
Criminal From Birth - Ahh, Criminal. We’ve definitely come into the zone of books I remember more of. Well, we started that with Starsigns, but even that’s already 8 years old in publication, and a good 10 years since its first inception. The idea came from a similar place as Empeddigo, actually. I wanted to do a sort of genre mash-up I hadn’t seen before, and it turned out to be fantasy courtroom drama. That’s because I’ve been a fan of the movie Basic for a long time and the form intrigued me. For those who haven’t seen or heard of it, it’s a story about an incident in military training in Cuba where a few soldiers ended up dying, and they bring in a disgraced former investigative agent to sort out what happened. The story gets rehashed multiple times, with the details being questioned and investigated until something unties part of the mystery and the real answers finally come out. If you’ve seen Hero or Roshomon, it’s that same sort of thing.
I didn’t pull it off nearly as well as I liked, but… that’s how we learn. The story I came up with involved investigating bits and pieces of one man’s life, all to determine whether the crimes he committed were things he could truly be blamed for or if he was doomed to commit them with no choice because of his own nature.
The hard part is that the book has turned out to be the first of a trilogy, and neither of its sequels are going to be a bit like it in that sort of setting or tone.
The Deadly Studies - This is probably one of the least-inspired-by projects I did, mostly because it’s a spinoff series. So I had to take most of the inspiration from the original source material, John G. Walker’s The Statford Chronicle. Since I was working in that world, with certain plot points, timelines, and character info to line up to, I had less freedom to do much. I don’t know that I can really pinpoint any sort of inspiring stories or sources for its format or anything, which strikes me as sort of odd for me. This is probably the closest I have to a general amalgamation of all the potential inspirations I’d taken up to that point in my life. I never really thought about that before. Weird.
I’m even going to go into how they strayed from the original ideas on some of them, because… why not?
Empeddigo - Man, this is digging back in the old days. I remember having two main basic ideas when I was developing this story: a fantasy/science fiction genre mashup, and an infectious disease. I definitely didn’t pull things off as well as I’d hoped, but to be totally honest… I haven’t read the book in a decade and a half. I remember very few of the details. I could probably only name three characters from it.
The Trials of Hallac - This is my epic poem, and a lot of my inspiration came from the format of other epic poems. Naturally, one of the main influences was The Odyssey. I’ve been a fan of Greek mythology since I was ten years old or so, and I took Latin in high school, so even the Romanized side of things was on my radar for a long time. Mostly the narrative technique of in media res affected me here, as well as the idea of there being certain specific, self-contained segments. The syllable-count system affecting the format was somewhat inspired by basic numeroulogy, but more from numerical symbolism across some faith systems. Like 3 and 7 being “lucky” or “holy” numbers, and therefore being the syllable counts spoken by deities, for example.
Plot-wise, it was strongly inspired by generalized fantasy gaming. The monsters and incidents were pretty basic in that regard. The main character’s familial conflicts were ripped pretty much straight out of Final Fantasy Tactics, with the main character being the third son and the only one born to a non-noble mother and therefore seen as less than his brothers.
Mere Acquaintances - So this story was really a project on writing vs editing and sticking to your guns. The nature of the project was to release it serially, much in the way authors like Charles Dickens published some of his works bit-by-bit in the newspaper. Mere Acquaintances was supposed to be something I never got to edit, a literal first draft novel put out as a sort of “don’t compare your first draft to someone’s finished product” kind of thing. There is a ton wrong with this project, and like Empeddigo, I doubt I could tell you much about it now other than what I remember. I haven’t read it in ages.
Starsigns - Now we’re getting into the books I definitely remember better. Starsigns went through a lot of changes from its first inception. The initial idea was “the boy who could speak fairy” and that whole idea came from my local renaissance faire. I’ve been going every year since 1999 (except for 2020 and 2021 - thanks Covid) so I’m super familiar with it. Well, we have an awesome gaggle of fairies who work the faire, and they have a certain high-pitched, somewhat bubble-throaty way of speaking. Think something like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, but more garbled. Anyway, it’s a voice I can easily do, so I’ve been “speaking fluent fairy” for ages and seeing people who can’t do it or who barely understand the fairies themselves gave me the idea of there being only one person known who can understand them.
Add in inspiration from Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings and even more from her Soldier Son Trilogy and… yeah, that was the basis for the book.
Like I said, it went through a lot of changes. The main character’s name was originally Kerr and he was one of like 7 or 8 siblings, mostly boys. He was the only one without a prescribed fate and was therefore considered sort of… extra. To the point the working title for the book for a very long time was “The Extra Son.” Well, Kerr turned to Cair, and his many siblings got pared down/combined into a set of boy-girl twins. The book was planned to span a few years, from Kerr’s early teens to his early twenties maybe. Cair’s story spans a few weeks at most. There’s no pirate storyline like I originally had planned. Hell, in the original plots, there was no Almo, and… I don’t think there was a Tivory, even.
In all honestly, I think Starsigns came out better than The Extra Son would have as originally planned, and I say that while still having some dissatisfaction over how Starsigns turned out!
Criminal From Birth - Ahh, Criminal. We’ve definitely come into the zone of books I remember more of. Well, we started that with Starsigns, but even that’s already 8 years old in publication, and a good 10 years since its first inception. The idea came from a similar place as Empeddigo, actually. I wanted to do a sort of genre mash-up I hadn’t seen before, and it turned out to be fantasy courtroom drama. That’s because I’ve been a fan of the movie Basic for a long time and the form intrigued me. For those who haven’t seen or heard of it, it’s a story about an incident in military training in Cuba where a few soldiers ended up dying, and they bring in a disgraced former investigative agent to sort out what happened. The story gets rehashed multiple times, with the details being questioned and investigated until something unties part of the mystery and the real answers finally come out. If you’ve seen Hero or Roshomon, it’s that same sort of thing.
I didn’t pull it off nearly as well as I liked, but… that’s how we learn. The story I came up with involved investigating bits and pieces of one man’s life, all to determine whether the crimes he committed were things he could truly be blamed for or if he was doomed to commit them with no choice because of his own nature.
The hard part is that the book has turned out to be the first of a trilogy, and neither of its sequels are going to be a bit like it in that sort of setting or tone.
The Deadly Studies - This is probably one of the least-inspired-by projects I did, mostly because it’s a spinoff series. So I had to take most of the inspiration from the original source material, John G. Walker’s The Statford Chronicle. Since I was working in that world, with certain plot points, timelines, and character info to line up to, I had less freedom to do much. I don’t know that I can really pinpoint any sort of inspiring stories or sources for its format or anything, which strikes me as sort of odd for me. This is probably the closest I have to a general amalgamation of all the potential inspirations I’d taken up to that point in my life. I never really thought about that before. Weird.
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