Look how well I keep up with my blog. Have you grabbed your free e-book yet? Just click on the free e-book button and grab one from Instafreebie.com. In any event, I’ve been sitting around making wishes for the fairies to carry out. Did you know that doesn’t work to get things done? But it did help give me some inspiration and ideas for things to write. Of course, having an extremely talkative guest in the house isn’t helping to streamline any sort of creative process. The great thing about being a writer is that you can write about anyone and anything. You can create a character based on that one really annoying, constantly distracting, aggravation in your life, and then just kill them off. Sure your search history of how to hide bodies or ways to kill people and not get caught might send up some red flags, but you’re a writer. Weird search histories go with the title, especially if you write murder mysteries… which I don’t, but if I did, those books would be my reasons if someone showed up at my door wondering why I was trying to poison someone. For my talkative nuisance, I find poetic justice in taping her mouth shut or just having her vocal chords mysteriously disappear. Anyway, I like to take walks every day, usually in the morning. What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, sometimes ideas pop in my head as I walk and look at the décor of my neighbors, like this picture I took of some rock formation. I can use this image to write about a mountain with a city hidden inside some of the flatter areas. Maybe a river where the rocks are. I should've got down a little lower for this shot. This is actually how I came up with the way a village in my fantasy novel, “A Warrior’s Path: Rise of a Legend,” looked. (Preorder Now) I wish I could find the picture to show. I’ve been looking through all my files, but it might be on the hard drive of an older laptop I have that decided it didn’t want to start up anymore. In any event, I saw this fountain in a Chinese restaurant and thought it looked really cool. It had houses at different levels and gaps were joined by bridges. The bottom only had one large building and then a few blocked off areas that looked like they could hold crops of some kind. In the base of the fountain were some pretty large koi. I remember looking at that fountain and thinking it would be a good place to train future warriors. People who lived there would need to have pretty impressive stamina to thrive in a place like that. And so I wrote all my ideas down and it became one of the first villages in my fantasy world. If that restaurant still existed, I’d drive back just to take another picture. I’ve taken other pictures that have influenced my world like this one I took in the Albuquerque Zoo. I pretend that a boat was about the size of my hand, and suddenly the rock formations take on a grand nature. I’ve taken pictures of water moving through melting ice and do a similar thing. Water moving down the street takes on a whole new life if you imagine a boat about an inch long were trying to maneuver it without crashing into the ice. Sounds like an exciting adventure to write about. Too bad I haven’t done that one yet. I’ll get around to it. I’ve always take pictures at mini-golf courses. They always seem to have interesting water hazards like at Bob-O’s in El Paso. Would I use a 10 inch doll as my reference for how big the waterfall would be or a smaller doll? I suppose it depends on how grand I want it to seem. All the businesses put something in the water to keep it clean. At Hinkle Family Fun Center in Albuquerque, their cleaner sometimes turns the water blue. I can either factor that into the story, or ignore it altogether. In some places, it looks like it has white stripes in it. Perhaps I can use that as a way to determine how the currents will flow… if I knew anything about sailing currents, but that’s what Google is for. While out on a walk I found a boot. Some people may wonder how that boot got there and if its owner will ever come back for it. Some people may take notice and not care or even give it a second thought. I wondered where its partner was and if it will ever get back to him or her. Is this boot lonely without the other? Did they have a fight? Does it regret the things it said to its other and vice versa? If it did want to get back, how would a lone boot accomplish such a task? Have I gone completely mad to wonder such things? Of course, but life’s more fun that way. Or maybe Disney has ruined me with cartoon shorts about houses, cars, and hats. I love those Silly Symphonies! Artist drawings work to create worlds too. They pour such and devotion into their work creating people and places it sort of seems like cheating to copy them in print. But hey, maybe they also created that drawing from someone else’s work. Artists inspiring artists, so to speak. Who knows. As long as it isn’t like a verbatim sort of line for line copy, and maybe if you thank them for inspiring you and mention the piece that did it, then it won’t be so bad. I don’t know the legalities of it. All I know is that pictures are a great way to inspire something new to spark in your brain no matter if you’ve visited the place and take them yourself or if you just found one online or in a museum that spoke volumes to you.
Well, yappy guest has started talking again and it’s throwing off my train of thought. Probably for the best. This one turned out sort of long. Let’s all work together to make a better world. We can be each other’s cheerleader. We all rise together. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And if you want more random streams of consciousness sent directly to your inbox, consider signing up for the newsletter.
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AuthorYA Fantasy author and amateur photographer living in New Mexico. A reflection of herself, her characters are timid at first but tend to stand up and push through when times get tough. Archives
April 2020
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