Without doubt one of the questions that I am asked most frequently is ‘where do your ideas come from?’ and the most repeated answer is ‘I don’t know!’. I think that very few, if any, of my ideas come to me fully formed. They all require development, but occasionally, they occur with such vivid strength that they prove difficult to ignore. When you are already working on an earlier idea for a story then this can prove to be a curse.

I put my previous project, ‘Should Iolos Fall’, on the backburner because I became convinced that something was missing, an essential element to the story, and that I needed time to discover what it was. Fortunately, an older idea was already forming, one that would become the basis of my current work in progress; Pomerania. I still intend to return to ‘Should Iolos Fall’, the kernel at the heart of the idea is good and deserves development, but the story as written lacks danger. That is the missing element. Pomerania has that element, although it might not be obvious in what I have written so far. Indeed, when I was working on the text yesterday it occurred to me that there was a subversive thread to the book that could stand to be further developed. A few hours later, when I was trying to relax, a new idea for another story just played out in my mind!

I would describe it as something like watching a short clip of an up and coming movie! The imagery was clearly defined, as were the relationships of three characters, the setting that they found themselves in, and, most surprisingly, the landscape of the immediate story itself, complete with a wide horizon for development. The only problem is that I do not have the time to work on this idea. I want to concentrate on Pomerania. It is the kind of story that I have never written before and therefore it is challenging me, only, this new idea is doing something very similar. I keep thinking about it. The vision of the three very different characters opening the story in a rather original way, or so it seems to me right now, has given rise to some ancillary ideas that are very appealing. I am in a very frustrating predicament! I do not think that I have ever been in a situation where I had three different stories going around my head at the same time!

Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon. In 67 days I will be taking early retirement and time, that most precious of commodities, will be available to me as a writer in greater quantities than I have known for a very long time. It is already agreed with my wife that I will have time to write. She is even keen to help me convert an unused space into a study, as long as I put a table in there for her to do her jigsaws on while I am busy writing. So, my immediate future could see me writing three books in very quick succession, well, if you consider three years a rather short period of time? Thanks, inspiration, you are not going to let me get bored when I no longer have a day job are you!