Hi Kelley
I discovered Solitaire to be a fascinating story and a memorable reading experience. What inspired you to write the book? Good success with your future writings and endeavors. Have a marvelous week.
Best,
Mary
I’ve talked some about this recently, although ideas and inspiration are not always the same thing. Ideas are easy, and inspiration is unreliable. Art and craft are hard. I suppose for me it comes down to sheer stubbornness. There are feelings or dynamics or states of being that I want to explore, and so I bash my head against the word wall until I find the story (the people, the situations, the choices and consequences) that seems the best vehicle. That’s such a long and iterative process that I can’t really pinpoint when it gelled for Solitaire.
Sadly, I’m not going to have a much better answer to this question for the next book (current shorthand for which is the Kansas book). It’s been mulching in my head for over a year now, and is the same in essence, and different in detail, than what I began with. Where did it come from? Nicola says it comes from my fascination with notions of rebirth (and you thought it was just about Kansas, grin).
Now the book after the Kansas book (the mountain book), well, hah! I know exactly where that one came from. Nicola and I took a short but lovely trip here last fall, and several different moments rubbed up against each other in my brain and conspired to give me the whole package at once, character and story and feelings, like a present in a pretty blue bow. This has never happened to me before, and strikes me as a rare and precious thing.
I hope you have a good week too.