Where I get my book ideas!

I've been a student of creativity techniques for a long time and I know how to sit down and use them to generate a list of ideas. I call this forced creativity and pretty much any book in the bookshop on creativity will help you with this.

However, my best ideas often occur organically - they develop sneakily beneath my consciousness and then pop out in an 'ah-ha' moment.

How does this help me you may rightly ask? Well, I have to feed this invisible idea process - and one way which has worked a few times for me is to make up stories for little ones - on the spot.

This is hard work and forces me to reach for the silliest ideas imaginable: child eating trolls, girls with huge hair styles stopping local robbers, and...a trouble-shooting Granny which become The Granny JJ Adventures.

Many of these ideas I didn't use but often...having dolled out a dose of ridiculous badly plotted story my subconscious mind would go to work and a day or two later inspire me.

My latest project: Jesus and Me - came from my daughter Seraphina insisting that I put her inside the bible stories I tell her most evenings.

Many of these are mentally edited on the spot and the act of doing this opens up new avenues of thought.

So while this isn't an 'instant success' technqiue it has produced the following books for me:

The Granny JJ Adventures vol 1
The Granny JJ Adventures vol 2: She back
The Girl Who Took Forever

and a few I have not chosen to pursue at this point:

Harmony and her huge hair
My Daddy is a Ninja!

Hope this helps!