Inspiration

Inspiration comes and goes.  One day I could have writing twitches every five seconds, and another I could go all day without feeling a single pull toward my two series.

In a very real way, my writing is an outlet for all the negative emotions that swirl around in my head.  All the evil I see in the real world gets translated into some aspect of the one on paper.  There are nuggets of joy and light, but they generally come after I've scratched open a scab and let it bleed for a few pages.

This can be especially true of my past.

Due to a falling out I had with my mother at the first offshoot of puberty, I have a tendency to give characters that are similar to me an exaggerated version of that horrible relationship with their same gender parent.  For example, Zero Naken is essentially a male version of me, and his father was physically and emotionally abusive.  I also have the habit of giving these characters some of my other issues.  Zero, though an amazing person, in my opinion, has difficulty finding a mate, has a fear of being abandoned, keeps many of his negative feelings bottled up, feels like he has to be completely self-sufficient, feels like he just isn't worthy of love, and...I could go on for days with this list, but you get the idea.

Although I spend a lot of time in my writing fending off darkness with a candle flame, I also find inspiration in everyday life.  I'm notorious for laughing about something a friend says and claiming, "Manuscript fodder."  I was once wandering around a department store when I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if the mannequins were holograms?"  I've even looked at an everyday item and thought, "Now why can't this do that?"  Several futuristic gadgets in Sven's world have come about because of this one.  I'm also an infamous name hijacker.  If I'm having trouble naming a character, I'll read everything (street signs, bill boards, notes, book spines, credit card receipts, name tags, bulletin boards, you name it) in search of that elusive identifier.  Heck, I named a shoe store The Hanging Slipper Box because I saw a store in Chicago with a similar name.