what inspires you?

Hard to believe that June is in full-swing already. I just remembered that my brother’s birthday is the 6^th, so I have got to get a card in the mail today. (That’s a huge goal for me to accomplish.) I am horrible at mailing out birthday cards, anniversary cards, etc. But my brother is so ridiculously on time with every card for every relative for every occasion that I will kill and maim to get his card in the mail on time.

Other than that, I haven’t gotten very far on this week’s goals. Because I decided to run through my first novel one more time, I have been doing nothing but that. I am up to chapter 13, but hope to finish by Thursday night and print out a copy for a friend of mine to read. I will also be scaring up others who are willing to read it and give me a thumb’s up or a thumb’s down. No one on the planet has read more than the first chapter, so I really need to start sharing it just for the feedback as to whether or not it is even worth any more effort on my part.

Looking back, I started this novel four years ago in January after having a dream about one of the main characters. It has to be time to finally have his story told. The poor kid, hanging out in my laptop all these years! He is the one in the front, second from the right. 

This picture was taken on my first trip to Kenya in 2006 and the dream I had in 2011 was about that boy right there and an American woman who travels to Africa and befriends him. I also need to write a back cover blurb for the book. And a title. Right now the working title is “Tale of an American Woman”, because the original title was “Tale of an African Boy”, but when I realized that I didn’t know enough about his culture to get inside his head, I switched perspective, and thus switched titles.

What inspires your writing? Dreams? Reality? Something else you read?