Where do you get your ideas?"

"Are you a people watcher?"

"Hey, my life is too dull to write about. How can I write about what I know? Nothing great ever happened to me.

Actually, with enough imagination, you can take a nothing life and make it into something. I'm a people watcher, but not avidly. I'm a pretty shy mouse most of the time.

Lucky for me, ideas for stories are all around me. Every experience, no matter how big or small can spark an idea for a story. Different people have different experiences, and different perspectives on similar ones. There's always a new twist on an old theme if one bothers to dig for it.

I generally don't have to dig. My creative juices flow pretty easily. Much to my sons' chagrin at times. Like the day, my son, Tristen, came home from school and reported that, for two days in a row, a pink carnation had been left on his desk in English class. Next, his notebook disappeared, and when it turned up again--in English class--"I Love You, Tristen Shaw" had been inscribed upon it with hearts to set it off. Was two years before he ever found out who left the flowers and wrote in his notebook. (No, he isn't dating her now.)

I don't know . . .you'd have to be blind not to see a story in that. I started one. Another day, as we drove home from someplace, Tristen began telling me how he wanted to start a lawn care business. His ideas were pretty close to a babysitters club. My imagination fired up and plot ideas flooded my brain. Mysteries in tool sheds . . . maybe missing pets were kept there . . . family secrets uncovered by a bunch of kids who agree to clean out a cluttered cellar . . . I saw a series in it. Started brainstorming a name for it.

Tristen complained, "You can make a story out of anything, can't you? If we had a flat tire right now, you could make up a story about it, couldn't you? If a fly landed on my arm and waved its antennae at me . . ."

Well . . . .yeah . . . .I could!

Sometimes, he and his brothers aren't terribly happy about some of the ideas I've come up with. But that's their fault for affording me so many, many, MANY of them. If I live to be 190, I'll only use a quarter of 'em. The rest, lucky for them, will be lost forever.

It occurred to me at the wake of one of my favorite aunts, that most of the people gathered there to mourn her passing, I had grown up seeing only at someone's funeral. Most of us lived in the same town at the time---just a block or so away. Never even bumped into each other at any gas station, supermarket, or McDonald's, never mind visit and get to know one another. What's up with that? We family or what?

Everyone expressed sadness and regret over the neglect to keep in touch, but no one really ever made an effort to change the pattern. Up pop all the old excuses for why is's not convenient right at this moment. Of course, there are those you once had close contact with---in fact were best buddies with---but . . . life happens, and you've drifted apart.

TA DA! Bring "Em Together, Joleigh! was born. A seven page short story that, after some encouragement from a fiction course instructor, plus the experiences revolving around the deaths of my parents, grew into the novel The Resurrection of Joleigh-Anna Kelmann. Not that I'd ever have the guts to do what she did in her situation . . .

Interesting jobs make interesting stories, or at least, offer interesting settings. But interesting things that happen in mundane jobs can, too, if written with insight and skill. I work as a personal care assistant for an elderly couple who have five grown sons. By the time I was comfortable in the job and with them, I had an outline for a romance in which the heroine is a PCA, and clashes with the couple's children. And falls in love with one of the sons. In the fiction account, the elderly couple gets to have daughters along with the sons. Katie appreciated that. I understand . . .even with half our pets female, I'm sadly outnumbered myself.

Speaking of my male darlings, I have a son with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. Fortunately the CP is mild. Yet, he's had to come to terms with the fact that while he can do most things other kids do, he can't do them quite as well nor as fast. This has been soooooo frustrating to him, poor kid. Plus, we've had some scary times when he's gone into grand mal seizures--one of the worst times I was sure we'd lost him. There's more than one story in every one of those sad and/or terrifying incidents. And I can make them as tragic or as positive as I want to. Whatever message it is I want to tell.

Now . . . the real miracle in writing, and the part that possibly one inherited from Mom, is grasping the mechanics of writing. You know, the grammar, sentence structure, spelling--all the stuff that makes writing seem such a chore. Usually, I like to say that the main thing is to just get the story down, and worry about all that stuff later. But-- there is much to be said about a beautifully written piece, that not only flows well, but has not one spelling mistake nor a typo anywhere within it. Just beautiful prose . . . ahhhhhhhhh, yeaaaahhhhh!

Now that's a story you can lose yourself in, and never be rudely yanked out of it because of glaring mistakes in grammar, story structure, typos, punctuation. and misspellings. And we all have to work at perfecting that part of it. Thoughts that come too fast for fingers to keep up with make for mistakes just as well as a lack of "natural" ability. Just ask me. . . :-)