It's a pretty sure bet that anyone who has ever tried playing the old subject and verb game has been asked that question more than once.
The answer is almost always the same: damned if I know.
In our case, both individually and collaboratively, we don't get the ideas; the ideas get us. From then on, it's a case of bolting the various pieces together and getting the engine to run. The ideas come from what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Universal Soul: the stories are swirling around out there in the universe and the writers are merely the channels they select to make their grand entrance.
Becoming Finnigan is a perfect example of that. The boy/girl game is one of the staples of literature simply because it's one of the staples of life. The great events of what Henry Luce called the American Century - the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the upheavals of politics in America are the beams and joists that we used to knock together the stage on which this eternal drama was played.
Next time, we'll talk more about how the story of Joel Finnigan and Althea Burnside emerged.
Becoming Finnigan is available in e-book and paperback from www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com
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