Goodreads asked M.R. Graham:

How do you get inspired to write?

M.R. Graham Really, most of my inspiration comes from just paying attention, seeing or hearing something that sticks and won't go away.
The Siren was inspired by a comment on a Youtube music video. (It was a Vitas video, for the record. Opera #2.) It said something like "This guy can't be human." At the end of a five-hour drive spent mostly stewing on that comment, I had the outline of a story.
The entire Liminality series started with one substitute teacher from Liverpool with stereotypically bad teeth, who exclaimed, in class, "I'm not a vampire! I'm English!" Of course, it's gone through an awful lot of enormous changes since I first started writing it in high school.
One of my current back-burner projects, one that will be out possibly in 2019 or 2020, started when I read an article about the Fiji Mermaid. (No spoilers, but it's not actually a mermaid story.)

I have a small yellow Moleskine notebook full of one- or two-line jottings of all those little things that stuck and that might have a story in them somewhere.

Others stem from long-time obsessions. That is to say, pastiche, which is what you call fanfiction when you're hoping it will be taken seriously.
For instance, I've known since I was about ten that I would eventually write a Sherlock Holmes story.
A bona fide Hammer afficionado, I also knew I would write a Dracula story, someday, and that one should be out this year.
Buried deep in the to-write pile is a Daphne du Maurier tribute that may or may not ever see completion.
That Fiji Mermaid story merged a little with my Hammer obsession and took on some of the more flamboyant aspects of their version of Frankenstein.

So, in a nutshell: Life, other people's conversations, and classic works I really admire.

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