Inspiration streaks across an author’s mind like a shooting star. Sudden. There and gone. Sometimes you make the wish and then the falling piece of space debris is gone. Other times, if you’re lucky, you grab that piece of inspiration by the tail, yank yourself on it, and ride that bucking sucker to a fully realized story.
Writing as a whole is not glamorous. Lots of hours. Hours with just you, yourself, and all those malicious voices in your head clawing, fighting to rise to the surface and shout for everyone to hear. It’s lonely. It’s frustrating when ideas don’t work. It’s frustrating when the ideas plug up, like a nasty ball of matted drain-clogging hair. Then there is the point when the novel is finished, the twentieth draft completed, and no one wants to read this hard earned masterpiece you’ve spent solitary hours crafting.
But there are those sparks. Like that first shooting star. The ideas are brilliant. The voices sing. And when ‘the end’ is typed, every voice is in harmony and everyone can dance to the song.
The shooting star, that rush at the onset, it ignites from many places. What is left, what propels a writer, is fueled by diesel, sometimes unleaded, a couple times by grass clippings, and in those rare moments by cosmic rays left by the shooting star’s tail. Most writers can’t tell you where those ideas originate. The shooting star comes in different colors, at different hours (even in the middle of the day, when most stars don’t shine).
The Our Monsters Chronicles comes from many different places. Those cannibalized story pieces are less interesting than the ‘shooting star’ that I rode while planning and outline the initial concept that led to the prologue of the first Our Monsters installment.
I was watching ‘Drive’, a Fox television show that didn’t live long enough to come into its potential as a cool series. Stupid Fox! They cancelled ‘Firefly’ too! Bastards!
Ahem. Excuse me.
Anyway, the opening song for ‘Drive’ is what fueled the planning of Our Monsters. Five friends come together against all odds to fight for each other and the creatures they’ve adopted and decided to protect. They become family. Eyes open. Forward. Forward toward the future.
Gavin Rossdale’s ‘Can’t Stop the World’ played on a endless loop as Jon, Bo, and their friends/family came together in my head and planted their feet, paws, claws, and hooves on the dangerous road they would walk to adventure.
Listen to Rossdale’s song (click here) and go read “Our Monsters” by ME! and feel how I did in the moments I first met my characters.
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