People ask me all the time: where do you get your ideas?
The answer is: everywhere.
Which is not terribly specific or helpful, I guess.
I can tell you where I got the idea for The Paradox Hotel: seeing Sleep No More and thinking, as I wandered the space, what if there was a hotel where you could go into a room and it was five minutes ago, or ten minutes from now?
I got the idea for The Warehouse when I read I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave by Gabriel Mac in Motherist. I thought: there’s a book here. It took me four years to find it.
Assassins Anonymous? Watching the movie Nobody, and I wondered: these uber-assassin characters always retire, swear off killing, get nudged by something, and slaughter hundreds of people. We cheer for them. What if one of them stuck with their vow?
I have a short story based on the time I walked by a bakery and, outside, there was a velvet rope and a bouncer. I have another based on my visits to the food markets in Singapore, and yet another based on that time me and my buddy Todd got stuck at a train crossing in the middle of the night in… I want to say Baltimore?
Point is, story ideas are seeds, scattered through the landscape of your life, and you pick them up and stick them in your chest and hope they grow into something.
Some do. Some don’t, and that’s okay. As long as you have enough of them, there will be some kind of yield.
This is a super round-about way of talking about this past weekend, when me and my partner Cyn took our kids to Erie, PA, so we’d be in the path of totality for the eclipse.
(Cyn is a brilliant mystic who is offering a series of classes on Tarot—the first one is this Wednesday, and it’ll cover the Fool card. You can learn more about that, as well as her other offerings, on her Substack
.)Anyway: we drove to Erie, to a cabin deep in Allegheny National Forest, with no internet or cell signal or, the first night, heat. We took the kids to a waterpark, where fears related to water slides were conquered. We ate at Cracker Barrel and Golden Corral. We watched the eclipse from inside a zoo and listened to the orangutans yelling in confusion as the light changed. We spent many, many hours sitting in traffic on the way back. I dusted off my DSLR and borrowed a lens with a 200mm focal length from my sister so I could take that picture, up there at the top of the post.
I could sit here and write for hours about it, but I won’t, because this is a newsletter and attention spans are short.
But the way the light dimmed and changed color, the way the shadows moved in strange patterns, the way it suddenly went dark and a cheer went up amongst the spectators, the way the sky seemed broken for nearly four minutes, the way the sun was just a black ball with a white blazing halo, the center of it blacker than anything I’d ever seen, and I could understand why primitive cultures who saw it might think the world was ending, but knowing what I know now, could appreciate it for the stunningly beautiful experience that it was…
It’s now a seed in my chest.
I didn’t walk away from the experience with a particular story idea (unless you count one of the kids asking on the ride home what would happen if a werewolf lived on the moon…).
But look up at the totality I knew that it was going to grow into something. It would sprout and weave its way into a story, like ivy overtaking the side of an old house.
That right there is the best kind of feeling there is.
If you want to find stories, you have to go out and look for them. You have to experience the world around you. Be open to it. Ask questions. Freeze your ass off in a cabin and sit in a ton of traffic.
That’s where I get my ideas.
Everywhere.
Thanks to Cyn for that last photo. I took a bunch more, and you can find them on my Instagram.