Where Do Ideas Come From?

Writers often get asked where they get their ideas. Most writers, I think, can’t really tell you, and their response will range from “I think I was in the shower,” or “I was driving to the coffee shop,” or some such vague thing.

The truth is, most of us don’t know where we get our ideas. They simply float to us in the ether and drift down like magical rainbow-sparkled star petals. Alternately, some ideas attack in the form of Plot Bunnies, it all just depends.

I’m typically in the “I don’t really know where my ideas come from” group and am apt to shrug and frown and squint trying to come up with a better answer than that. As for Wild as the West Texas Wind, however, I can tell you exactly how I came up with the idea and this is how it happened.

I was at GRL 2017 (Denver), where the theme for the costume party was, as I recall, the Wild West. I went as Felina, the girl from Rosie’s Cantina in the Marty Robbin’s song, “El Paso.” The reason for this is because I have loved this song since I was very young, and my poor impressionable heart simply ached at the thought of the young man who was in love with Felina who, in her turn, was always flirting with other guys.

Part of the refrain of the song goes: “One night a wild young cowboy came in, wild as the west Texas wind,” and the notes rise to a mournful pitch, exactly echoing how the wind might sound. That’s my favorite part of the song, of course! It is with this wild young cowboy that Felina makes the young man jealous, there is a shootout, and then both the young man and the wild young cowboy die.

So I’m at GRL, and having had a few drinks with P. D. SInger, I told her about my idea to write a story based in Rosie’s Cantina. Except this time around, young man and the wild young cowboy actually don’t have a shootout, but discover together that Felina is a temptress and they’d be better off with each other than with her.

The folks at the table with us agreed that it was a mighty fine idea and that I should go for it! It was P. D. Singer who suggested the name of the story be the part of the refrain that affected me most: WIld as the West Texas Wind. (P.D. Is a font of sensible advice!!)

At that time, I’d written two books in my Love Across Time series, and hadn’t determined what the third would be, but as I started thinking about it, I realized that a wild young cowboy could fall in love but not with anyone from Rosie’s Cantina. Instead, he would fall in love with a young man who’d been dragged into the past, into the year 1892. And since readers wanted to know more about Laurie’s friends that are mentioned in Honey From the Lion, I decided that Laurie’s friend Zach would be the hapless time traveller to end up in the New Mexico desert. And thus, a story was born.

Ideas are like magic lightning. You never know when one will strike you!