Spark That Lights the Fire

Feb. 19, 2018 – Tell us a story about a time when a piece of inspiration hit you. We’ve all had them.

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I get inspiration from a lot of different places. My apocalyptic series Transformation Project comes from news media interacting with my college studies of political science and all the lovely conspiracy theories available out there.

But I can’t point to just one point of inspiration. It’s more like a lot of bits of information that finally got together to propel me toward a story.

Now, Daermad Cycle started with an inspirational moment. It was close to 25 years ago. Our daughter was a baby. It was a hot summer day and a rainstorm rolled in. My husband and I were sitting in our one-room cabin, watching the kid try to catch her toes and listening to the raindrops pattering on the roof. Brad turned on one of Enya’s albums.

I remember the dog and the baby were snoring in unison and the music and the rain took my imagination to a new world. It was a rainy green meadow that stretched from high mountains to distant forests. A man was riding a sorrel mare along a trail between tilled fields and intermittent copses of trees. I could see water around the foots of bushes and trees and see young shoots pushing their way into the spring air. And, then, ahead, was a stone wall and a rough gate in it.

And that was my image of Celdrya and the character of Padraig who forms the central ensemble of Daermad Cycle. The scene appeared in The Willow Branch. I wanted to get to know that character and actually, the first several scenes for the book wrote extremely easily. Of course, things have changed as I worked on the early drafts, but that scene had to make it into the published book because … well, it is the spark that lit the fire.