More from Jay Lake, but this time about where the ideas come from. This discussion is fascinating to me because everybody has a different way of coming up with ideas.

Personally, I work from images that just come to me. Something will strike me during the course of the day or it might be a lingering picture or scene from a dream. These form the seeds of my stories.

A lot of times I’ll be thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago. This may be in an attempt to deal with it. I’m not sure. Sometimes it occurs to me that a pretty simple event actually had some deeper significance.

After reading Hemingway I realized that the simplest things could be very meaningful and that stories can be found in the most mundane happenings.

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