Monday Musings…Inspirations

So, it looks like things are on schedule and my next book will be coming out in June. Yay! That said, I thought it would be fun to spend a few Mondays sharing some things about my next book, how it came together, and finding out from you today what inspires you to be creative.

What inspires me? A lot of different things. I’ve mentioned before that The Eyes of the Heart came out of my love for a children’s book and a history class I was taking in college. But this book was a bit different.

For this novel, there were two distinct things that jump started my novel: an article in a newspaper I read and a song. Some time ago, I read in a newspaper an article about a man who was a well-known photographer of the Civil Rights Movement. Like, that is what he was known for. But then he died. And his family went through all his papers and discovered that the man was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent during the Civil Rights Era. Instead of being impressed or wowed, they were extremely upset, and concluded that his legacy was a joke (paraphrase). And I remember reading that article and thinking just because the man was an FBI agent (which seemed pretty cool to me) did not mean that he was in any way anti-Civil Rights. Why couldn’t he be both? And so I try to reconcile those two identities in my new book, Unfailing Love with my hero Truitt Tate.

I was also inspired by a song called “Deep Blood Red” by Mali Music. Music definitely inspires me as a writer, but rarely as much as it did with this song. It actually wasn’t the lyrics so much as the feel of the music. I heard the song, and I saw two people dancing, in the American south, at someone’s farm, and I knew the man was the law, and the woman was a native, that he loved her, and that they had a history there (yes, this scene is actually in the book).

I’m currently working on another book, and I can tell you now that I was inspired by the life of a man who was introduced to me in a legal class I took in law school. It’s never the same for me (though often similar). Lightening rarely strikes twice.

And so I ask you, if you paint, if you write, if you sing, if you dance, if you cook, what inspires you or has inspired you in the past? Is it music? Movies? TV shows? Other books? Actual people? Let me know!