Where it began.

I will always remember where I got the idea for the books beginning. It was a night time and I as standing by the window looking out over the dark Mediterranean Sea while living in Spain.
CNN was on the television keeping me company in the background.
It was the lead up to the Beijing Olympics and there was a report about the protests by monks in Tibet
This instantly became the starting point. What would happen in the story from that beginning I had no idea because like my painting, I would discover that my writing would also be improvisational, expressionistic, and relatively spontaneous. One action would lead to another, cause and effect. This process became less so as the story developed because past events would need to match and link with future ones so bridges needed to be connected between the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle for events to be plausible.
Through the apparent spontaneous actions of the characters in a book, the author needs to be playing a god by also creating their plausible fates.