QUESTION: Which of these books originated because of something I found in the news?
- Be Careful What You Wish For, Friction, and Barely Tattooed
- Charade, Bullet, and Shake Me
- No News is Good News, On the Run, and A Thin Line
- Love and Lies, Verses, and Looking for Love
The correct answer is A.
Most of the time, my ideas come from the ether (or my brain or my muse, something I’ve talked about before), but sometimes I’m inspired by something I learn through the news. Now, this isn’t news the way we typically think about it, but in our modern world, news can come from lots of places. In other words, I’m not necessarily talking about something you’d see on CNN or network news at 5:00 pm. I’m talking about all the ways we consume news nowadays.
Let’s go down the list.
If you’ve ever read Be Careful What You Wish For, then you probably know the story behind it, but here goes with, possibly, a little more depth. I live about thirty miles south of Colorado Springs, home of—for what has been for a good chunk of my life—my favorite radio station, 94.3 KILO. It was always playing in the background of our old family van, and when I’d take the kids to school, right around 7:35 AM, KILO had a segment called the “Freak News” (still on the last time I listened). Basically, they shared with listeners the funniest news stories from across the nation—and one day, they told the story of a woman who was so convinced her husband was cheating that she hired a woman to seduce him. But the joke was on her because the seducer and her husband wound up getting together. Now, I don’t love the idea of people cheating, but there was something somehow karmic about the idea of someone who has so little trust in her spouse that she intentionally puts him in a position to do exactly what she’s afraid of, essentially getting what she asked for (and, thus, the inspiration for the title). And my mind wouldn’t let that go. How would that work? I wondered. So I wrote a short story that appeared in the no-longer-published book Quickies where I explored that idea. What kind of woman would hire someone else to do that? What kind of woman would say yes to the task? And why would the man follow through if he wasn’t actually a cheater? The story kind of wrote itself and my characters told me they were soulmates. Well, readers wanted more, so I turned the story into a novel where I explored what happened after the dust settled.
Friction was originally published under the title Finger Bang. Long story—don’t ask! But, at the time, I had a street team I chatted with every day on Facebook, and one of them pointed me to this article, the title of which is funny in its own right: Boulder is now the clit tickling capitol of the world.
At the time, my oldest daughter was attending school in Boulder, which made the concept even funnier—because it was fairly close to home. Anyway, after reading the article about Orgasmic Meditation, it quickly inspired the story of Blaze and Kaylee, and it all starts out with an OM adventure and ends in HEA.
Both of those were light-hearted stories, but this next one is a little less so. Actually, it’s much darker, but it was an event that truly inspired a story. It was something that happened in the town where I live, and I used to get the newspaper at the time, so the story haunted me as I read about it day after day. Not far from my house, a woman lived with her boyfriend and her children (not his). I don’t know the history behind the event, but what I do know is that one morning, he killed the mother with a gun and threatened to kill the children. The oldest daughter, a young teen, ran to a neighbor’s house to call for help. A very long time after that event, I wondered how that kind of thing–losing their mother and nearly losing their own lives–would affect someone. How would it change them? Would a young woman ever be able to trust a man again? Those questions eventually led to the book that became Barely Tattooed.
If you haven’t had an opportunity but now want to read these books, here’s your chance:
Every once in a while in my Rockstar Romance Newsletter, I’ll be dropping a little trivia question pulled straight from my research—except this time, it’s more like “How did existing information I wasn’t looking for inspire something?”
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