That's what inspiration is for me

Sometimes I spend a whole year not having a single good idea. To be honest, it's pretty depressing. I don't create my ideas. I create supper. I toss around a few food combinations, pick one that looks good, and I make it. But ideas come out of nowhere. I turn on my mental radio (which I do every day, of course) and usually there is nothing, just dead air. But every once in a while, something happens.

And then I have to listen like crazy, because I have to write it down while it's still there. And then I have to decide if it's any good. It often isn't. But sometimes, it just grabs onto me, and I know that if I don't make something good out of the idea, I have somehow failed.

As I said last time, the whole book wrote itself in a two hour walk. I had wanted to write a vampire novel, specifically a novel about a female vampire. But Stephenie Meyer blew the lie off that idea. I knew that I had to invent a new monster. So death fairies were born in Rome. Maybe it was that in Rome, two thousand years of history live side by side. Maybe it was that in Rome, I didn't have to wear boots or a jacket or gloves, and so I wasn't dominated by the body, but was free to let my imagination travel where it wanted. I don't know, and I will never know. Writing, as Plato said, is a divine madness. That's what inspiration is for me: a divine madness.