Splendiferous stories
Where do you get your ideas from? It is perhaps one of the trickiest questions to answer as an author, because all too often I have no idea. Sometimes, however, I notice the pinging together of tiny electrons of inspiration.
It started before Christmas in 2013 when I was asked if I’d do some short stories for the nerdbong podcast. They’d been very enthusiastic about Hopeless, Maine, and had interviewed me, so I said yes. I didn’t have much material of the right length lying about, so I started gathering ideas and trying to squeeze them into story shapes.
One in the Oven began with a Sunday night listening to Genevieve Tudor’s folk program on radio Shropshire. As it was in the lead up to Christmas, she played a song about King Herod, which described his eyes as like saffron cakes. That stuck with me. Then a day or two later, Walter Sickert (Army of Broken Toys, not the deceased artist) expressed an intention to dress up as Krampus and lick people. Nothing logical or reasoned happened at this point. It never does. There is a wild and irrational jump from having a couple of disparate ideas to having something that connects up as a story. Sinister cakes, and a Krampus, and I was good to go.
I sat down to write with just those seeds of ideas – I did not know the shape of the story or anything about the characters. However, I’d also been listening to Miss Von-Trapp’s murderous version of the 12 days of Christmas, and her other delightfully psychotic songs, and I’d got something of her voice in my head. So I wrote doing my best impression of her, and the rest of it fell out of me by accident with little planning. I redrafted and tidied it up, recorded, and submitted it.
Then, because I am just exceedingly fortunate sometimes, my good friend Professor Elemental piled in to do the introduction and rounding up. His words frame mine, and remind me just a little bit of Edward de Sousa’s Man in Black and my first (camp) horror encounters as a child.
You can listen to ‘One in the Oven’ here, and there will be more… http://nerdbong.com/nerdbongs-splendiferous-stories-slumber/
