A to Z Challenge: I is for Inspiration
The A to Z challenge is a challenge in which bloggers post every day during the entire month, and each day has a post starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The first day, the post features “A”, the second day “B”, and so on. It’s much better explained on the Blogging from A to Z website, so I’ll just refer you there.
Today I want to talk about inspiration, in particular, about the things that inspired me to write some of my books. There are tons of posts out there that talk about ways to get inspired, but I don’t think I ever mentioned where I got inspiration from for my series.
For the Mirrorland series, I got inspired by a picture of a mirror I found online while randomly browsing through stuff. The mirror looked creepy, and a hand reached out through the mirror. It was enough for me to come up with a ghost story about a girl being haunted by a mirror she found on her attic. Except, you know, that story is sort of basic, so I kept on adding stuff and lore until it was a lot more than a ghost story, but in it’s original form, it was just that.
For the Angel of Death Series, I actually came up with the idea of the second book first. The second book has a lot of characters we don’t get in the first, and it already has a set world-building. I came up with this one rather by chance, when I was thinking one night about how The Vampire Diaries TV series would look like if it featured Angels rather than vampires, and then I mashed it with a bit of Buffy, threw in some lore, and ended up with the outline of a book. Sometimes it’s that simple. But I couldn’t start off in the middle of the action – I had to think up book one then, and that took a lot more thinking it through, because I didn’t want to stick to known stereotypes and tropes.
The Valentina series popped up randomly in my mind when I decided I wanted to write a picture book. I love all things paranormal, especially vampires, and when I was a kid, I constantly nagged about how few children’s books dealt with monsters, so I wanted to write one. The Weirdville series is inspired by R.L. Stine and the Goosebump series: I wanted to write my own series of creepy books for kids.