Raindrops on Roses

What ‘makes’ inspiration for you?  Is it a muse?  A person?  A place?  Or just the magic within, pure and simple?

For me, there’s a moment, right before a storm when the air is heavy with electricity and your heart beats faster, your instincts telling you something is about to happen.  All your senses are on high when mother nature gives you a heads up- something inside you rises to the occasion.  That feeling, the one where you feel like something huge is about to happen, something you don’t witness every day, something magical- for me that’s inspiration.  The feeling that anything is possible, any world, any story.

And then there are places that feel as though an entire tale is laid out for you already, just waiting to be told.  Everything about it has you wondering who walked these steps before you, what problems they might have had, who they were running from or who they were running to and what became of them-  It has you building ideas and outcomes in your head until you have no other choice but to spill them out and give that place a story.

What ‘makes’ inspiration for you?

Monday Misdemeanor

Starting this week, Mondays are going to be dedicated to some of the slightly rebellious escapades that I find have contributed to my stories, characters, and imagination in general.

Today’s Misdemeanor:  Trespassing

The house where I grew up was located on a cul-de-sac with nothing but forests and farmland for about a half mile in all directions. The neighborhood kids and myself used to like to play in the surrounding woods.  We always knew where the properties for the farms began because of the barbed wire-slash-decaying stone wall that marked the boundaries.

The barbed wire wasn’t easy to get over, but eventually we found a way to weigh it down and explore ‘forbidden territory’. 

To this day, I swear that some places exist just to inspire the imagination.  That was the case with what we discovered beyond that wire.  The field stretched out into the distance with a few sparse trees in its midst.

One of the tall trees bordering the field had been outlaid with a tree house platform and barriers à la Punky Brewster.  In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the most stable contraption in the world.  Everything squeaked a bit when the wind blew.  But for me, it was like I had walked onto the set of the film version of how childhood is supposed to be.

The best day was when I wondered into that field one morning to find six or seven horses grazing.  I’m still not sure if they were farm horses or a few specimens from the nearby glue factory but I was SO excited to see them up close.  It was just magical.  The entire place was, really, and I could spend hours up in that old rickety tree house wondering who made it, and for whom.  My mind made up a thousand different versions of who had climbed the nailed-on wooden chunks that passed for a ladder before I had.  And the farm itself was owned by the cast of ‘Charolottes Web’.  Ofcourse.   I never did see the horses again.

So that’s my misdemeanor of the day and what it led me to.  

Has anyone else ever unexpectedly stumbled onto a place that just seemed unreal or inspired their imaginations in some way?


I keep forgetting to post my entry to 'Where in the World is Candyland?' contest.  Here it is Candy!  You're psychadelic dude.