In answer to: "What inspires you to to write?"

I lead a pretty busy life.  I have a lot of kids and dogs, a wonderful husband and a very old parent who lives with me.  Like all of us, schedules change rapidly and I’m not always up on exactness.  What I have written down on my handy dandy list to do for the day gets changed at the drop of a hat.  So, although writing is something I love to do, it sometimes gets pushed to the back of my list and sometimes (quite frankly, a lot of times) it’s something I have to try to make time to do.

For anyone who has ever sat down to write anything, you know that sometimes the blank page is quite threatening.  On my limited time frame, I can’t just have a staring contest at a blank Word page, and I’ve never been one of those people who can speed write anything and have it turn into a thought; for me it’s either there or it’s not.

So, I put a few ideas down as I go through my day.  Sometimes they end up in my planner, sometimes they are stored in my phone, and sometimes I jot them down on a piece of scrap paper and manage to get that into my bag.  Then, when I sit down to write, I dig the ideas of today out and I either find myself inspired by them or I just file them for another time.

I have a file on my hard drive which has a couple of hundred ideas.  There are scenes with no book idea, there are character traits with no story line, and there are phrases which I might need in the future.  It’s a Hodge Podge of raw ideas that when I’m blocked I draw from to “get inspired” again.

One thing I can say is that I’m not the kind of writer that just knows enough to stay in one genre.  From children’s books to horror and sci-fi, I’m all over the fiction spectrum.  I use different pen names (even a different gender) to reflect how I “feel” about what I’m writing.  My comfort zone is the “awwww” stories; you know that ones that make you feel warm and fuzzy, but I like to mix it up a bit to stay fresh with ideas.

Sometimes in the middle of a horror story I’ll get a great idea for a sci-fi or a sappy fiction novel.  I guess I’m just a little shy about putting all my work out there; but due to my agent, that’s no longer an option.  You will soon be able to see some of my other works in various genres and I’ll be sharing my pen names with you as well.