They call the wind Katrina

Where do ideas come from?

The problem in explaining that to the younger writer (young in the sense of experience) is that ideas don't arrive in words. They are working with, "I have this idea of a boy who discovers he is half-alien and inherited a laser sword from his real father and then has to fight an evil empire."

When you've been in the writing business for a while, they are rather more inchoate. Stuff is sort of getting caught in the baleen and at some random point you turn around and realize you could connect this to this ...and that's when it becomes something you can put down in your notes.

That's where I was when the idea of doing a "waking up with amnesia" story crossed paths with "boy, I'm tired of First Person." And then it bumped into "I'd love to do something with New Orleans, especially in re Katrina and the diaspora."

And that's when that town and that historical context started showing up everywhere. Someone in a writing subreddit was asking about researching the Big Easy for an urban fantasy, and wanted to set it around 2005. KPFA has been doing a mammoth retrospective (turns out there is a series I wish was on my streaming resource).

I have a mild connection due to working a show that celebrated the voices of the diaspora, bringing many transplanted musicians from New Orleans together for a concert.

Those ideas of nucleation and growth are strong; when that parent crystal is big enough, it jars all the other stuff around it like a Flyer in Conway's Life. It attracts things that you didn't realize could fit, and turns them into ever more elaborate structures. And it just sort of happens, without having to write an outline or a story bible or pay up your licenses on World Anvil.

That's how ideas get out of hand. It isn't a matter of hammering away, it isn't a blinding flash of inspiration, it isn't a writing prompt you could ask CatGTP to spit out. It is just how the writer's mind works.

Because it really is the same stuff you are doing all the time anyhow. All the time, you are fleshing out, adding details, discovering or forging connections. Not just for the big overall plot, not just at the outline level. Right down to individual lines of dialogue.

Well...back to draft #3 of Penny getting checked out for possible radiological contamination. I've been weak, and injured my back as well, so not the most productive week. But I did rework part of the first big Mary Cartwright chapter.

Her personality was inspired by a Tewa writer. But I just discovered and archive-binged a blog from an equally angry Cherokee writer, Native Appropriations. Which made me rethink a couple of things Mary said, especially re Cody and his revisionist western series about a young boy named Chato.

Plus I'm trying to get the opposition into the picture as an active force. I've added a mystery truck to that chapter. Not sure how I can do anything earlier, and my head canon says Evil Kitty didn't start worrying about Penny until after they found out through their military contacts that she'd been messing around with Site Theta.

And....I just discovered there is an abandoned Six Flags in New Orleans. Trashed by Katrina and never rebuilt. How could you not use something like that in a story featuring a student archaeologist turned urban explorer?