Story Ideas

On my Route 66 book tour for Sky Blue that I took in August, 2007, a couple of story ideas came to mind. This wasn’t surprising since I was in the car by myself driving for over 2,000 miles. But the ideas themselves were surprising. 

I already knew that I wanted to write the book called Ghostwriter and I had the story mapped out. But something interesting happened during my book tour. I bought Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album during one of my stops in Arizona at a bookstore. That album seemed to fit the never-ending highway and the vast, open spaces of Arizona. But it also seemed to fit in this novel I was going to start writing. The echoes and ghosts of Pink Floyd permeate Ghostwriter. I never planned on that happening–it just worked out that way. 
The other story idea that evolved came when I was lost on my way back from the Grand Canyon West. It was dark and I was almost out of gas and I had no cell service and suddenly I found myself in the middle of NOWHERE. And it did freak me out quite a bit. 
You’ll see that scenario played out in the next story I’m going to be writing called Broken. Oh, sure, the lost in the wilderness story has been told before. But as usual, I’ll give it a nice little twist.