Inspiration is easy; it’s the perspiration you’ll have to work for when crafting your fiction. And Mighty Mur is proving it with her latest project, The News from Poughkeepsie. She is blogging an idea a day for a year to make a point: Don’t worry about people stealing your IDEAS.

She may use some of the ideas herself for her own fiction, but you can do the same for yours. Feel free to feed her fiction fodder to your famished muse. (Say that three times without tangling your tongue and I’ll KNOW you’ve had your coffee already.)

The only cost: Mention where you got the idea and link back to the blog post where you found the idea. The price is right!

She began on April 22. See her archives so far here, and subscribe to the whole Murverse feed here to get more, effortlessly.

Photo credit: Striatic

Technorati Tags: fiction writing, Murverse, Mighty Mur, Mur Lafferty, story ideas, inspiration

I’m currently writing a story about a pregnant woman who’s bitten by a desperate vampire. It usually helps me figure out what way I want a story to go if I make lists of some plot options and some background options. Here are some of the weird/gruesome possibilities swimming through my brain right now:

Vampirism is caused by:

• Nanos.
• Virus.
• Magic.
• Other?

Options when a pregnant woman is turned into a vampire:

• She turns into a vampire but loses the baby.
• She turns into a vampire, but her pregnancy proceeds as normal and she delivers a human baby.
• She turns into a vampire, but her baby slowly starves. (Does her body reabsorb and return to non-pregnant shape? Effect on her mentally?)
• She turns into a vampire, but she stays pregnant forever. Her son remains human.
• She turns into a vampire, but she stays pregnant forever. Her son becomes a vampire in her belly. (Do they communicate telepathically?)
• She turns into a vampire and gives birth to a vampire. He eventually grows to adult size and is a vampire too – a totally “normal” vampire. (How long does his childhood last? Breastfeeding - does he bite her AND get milk? Just bite? Is given blood in a bottle? Do children vampires lose their baby fangs?)
• She turns into a vampire and gives birth to a vampire. He stays infant size forever but develops normally mentally.
• She turns into a vampire and gives birth to a vampire. He stays infant size forever but is mentally deformed by this.
• She turns into a vampire, and when the baby turns too he claws his way out of her belly to feed. It kills her.
• She turns into a vampire, and when the baby turns too he claws his way out of her belly to feed. She recovers because of vampires’ recuperative powers.

Reactions of local vampire coven/seethe/nest when they find out what happened:

• They help the woman and the baby.
• They help the woman but kill the baby.
• They kill the woman but help the baby.
• They kill both the woman and the baby.
• Indifference; it’s not their problem.
• Nothing; they never find out.
• Other?

So. What kind of lists, if any, do YOU make when you’re tinkering with your fiction?

Photo credit: Memnoch, some rights reserved.

Technorati Tags: making lists, fiction writing, vampires

Some news stories just beg to inspire a fiction story, don’t they? The one about the Italian thief who’s reportedly hypnotizing convenience store clerks and running off with their cash did raise my eyebrows, but it really captured my interest after Scott Adams grabbed hold of it. He explains how it could — theoretically — work. Wouldn’t that be a cool Law & Order episode, maybe as one of the secondary plot lines?

What news stories and rumors have made you reach for YOUR keyboard lately?

Technorati Tags: inspired by news, writing inspiration