I recently joined Goodreads, and got set up with their author side. I haven’t set up a blog with them–I have this one, and another one elsewhere. I spend a lot of time on Facebook, too, checking frequently for messages from friends (and I accept a lot of people I’ve never met as friends, once I’ve checked to see if I can tell if they’re a spammer, bot, or fake).
They set up seed questions for authors: things like where do you get your inspiration?
Well…that depends. Some things are inspired by things I’ve seen, others by things I’ve heard. Detritus, for example, was sparked by “Low Man’s Lyric.” My unfinished book, The Schrodinger Paradox, was inspired by Starset’s entire album Transmissions–not any particular song. The Modern Gods series is a lot different: I dreamed the very first chapter, woke up laughing, and had to write the story…which spawned another, then another, and then a wild plot appeared. My Pendragon books were sparked by a “what if?” Specifically, what if King Arthur Pendragon had been a shape-shifting dragon, rather than straight human? How would that work with the stories that have been passed down, and what might have been gotten completely wrong? My current project which has only a rough working title was a writing exercise from a class when I was in college that I decided to carry on with. Another was sparked by a button pin that read Certified Public Assassin.
In other words, the inspiration differs. I find things to write about in everything in life.
The horrid drivers in town might want to be aware of that. Larry Correia and John Ringo might not be the only people looking for redshirts.