Ideas — If you define an idea, it will likely find you.
Ideas or inspirations will pop into your thoughts when your mind is open to receiving them. My wife and I had just finished a walking trip exploring the Border Abbeys of Scotland. Following these trips, we enjoy immersing ourselves in the culture of a new city for a short while. After a train trip to Inverness in Northern Scotland, we rented an Airbnb in Glasgow. On the first full day, we hopped on a hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the city. But first, a little background.
After several decades of founding and managing businesses that were based on creating designs and inventing products, I sold my businesses to loyal employees who had sacrificed and made those businesses work. I needed to maintain a creative outlet in retirement, so I began writing books. Trust me, writing books is not retirement. At first, I felt it natural to write about what we learned from our businesses. The first book, Invent, Innovate, and Prosper, was and is a consistent seller and extremely well-reviewed. The second was a support workbook for the first book, which wasn’t a seller at all. The third, which I enjoyed writing the most, was fiction but a story that told those embarking on a career of running a business based on creativity and time management how to succeed. It was short but informative on creating financial success selling time, but it hasn’t sold well. I think I will reposition it and retitle it at some point, but the story it tells is how I turned my first design consultancy business into a money-maker. What’s the point? You ask.
The thing for me about How Julia Found Happiness and Financial Success was the freedom of writing fiction laced with facts, and I truly fell in love with the writing process and the creative outlet it gave me. After Julia was published and I spent time marketing my books, it was time for the trip to Scotland. I was by then looking for inspiration and an idea for a novel that I could become immersed in and that had a basis of interesting facts. I was particularly drawn to crime (not personally), but mysteries and crime stories are the most interesting to me.
Back to hop-on-hop-off in Glasgow. It was a misty, then rainy day, and we fiddled with those annoying dated earplugs on the bus, trying to get a clear description of the sites we were visiting. Turning the dial a few times back and forth and adjusting the volume landed me on the pleasant voice of a young lady, a student of history. As we traveled, she entertained us with color and embellishments that truly enhanced the usual tour guide blandness found on these tours.
I think knowing that my mind knew what I was looking for opened a mental door as the bus toured the historic shipyards of the River Clyde, the ship-building heart of Great Britain; the guide told an intriguing story of the Steamship Ferret, described by newspapers as “lost, stolen or strayed” from the river in 1881 and completely disappeared. This fact set me on a course of research that led to my upcoming novel, Stolen Brilliance — A Lady Black Victorian Mystery, scheduled for an April release.
In my next posts, I will tell you about Ferret and the process I’ve gone through to research and write the book. I will present some of the true facts that didn’t make the novel but that I find interesting. and I’ll introduce you to the characters.
I would love to hear from you about how I can make this series of posts more interesting and useful for you.
I don’t know the young student’s name, but I would like to thank her for planting the idea that is growing into a fiction series, still in the making.
Happy Writing
