I'm here! It's Lenora :)

Last night, I saw on my calendar that today was my day to blog. Then I got involved in a chapter and finished that up and promptly slinked downstairs and fell into my chair (where I got bleary-eyed and decided to go to bed.) So I'm standing in the kitchen this morning, drinking coffee while I looked out over all my lovely saga palms that are now brown and dying from intensely cold temperatures and suddenly it hit me--Lenora, it's your day to blog! I don't usually move that fast in the morning, let me tell you. Even forgot to take my blood pressure medicine.

Now I'm here, writing away when a dear writer friend calls and we laugh and talk about being in the middle of a conversation and suddenly going blank because a plot point has just popped in out heads. That got me to wondering--what was the strangest place you ever came up with a story idea? It's usually in church for me, during a beautiful hymn. I can't tell you how many three books contracts I've gotten out of the words of a hymn. My "In the Garden" series is based on that beautiful hymn, of course. (Three books--set on an estate in South Louisiana.) This Sunday, I was sitting there listening to a guest speaker, thanking God for allowing me to finish the first draft of the latest work in progress and suddenly, I realized I needed to change the ending of the book. Something the speaker said prompted that. I grabbed paper and pen and jotted down some notes. My friends just smiled. (They know me so well.) Back to "In the Garden". Adding to the idea I got in church while singing that--a few weeks after that Sunday, we left early one morning to travel to Georgia to see relatives. There had been an ice storm in our area and I saw a convoy of tree service trucks heading back to Mississippi. They had come over to help out during our crisis. That gave me the idea for one of the heroes in that series. He would own a tree service company and he'd come to the estate to help cut back some trees after a big storm. And the heroine would have a phobia--she'd be deathly afraid of the dark. Why? Well, that was part of the fun.

So ... this is why we sometimes forget to blog, why we sometimes forget to take our medicine, feed the cat, cook the meals and wash the clothes. This is why we stare off into space at the oddest times and why even in church, we might do what I call the Scarlett O'Hara gasp (remember the scene where her mother is giving evening prayers??)and go blank. It's because a writer's brain is wired just a bit differently from "civilian" brains. We're always sniffing out stories. And that's just part of the fun of our jobs. So ... what was the strangest place you ever came up with an idea for a book??