Today, I’m happy to have Mark R. Hunter here to talk a little about his newest book, The No-Campfire Girls. A fellow member of the Ink Slingers League, he’s a pretty funny guy with a pretty insightful take on that most dreaded of questions posed to writers: “Where do you get your inspiration?”
Take it away, Mark!
Sometimes I’ll finish a manuscript, look back over the story, and think: “Where the heck did this come from?”
On the other hand, sometimes it’s pretty clear where I got my story idea.
Storm Chaser? “Hey, I think I’ll write a story about a storm chaser.” Of course, after the initial idea things went wildly out of control, starting with the fact that my storm chaser became, technically, a disaster photographer. But Disaster Photographer didn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Coming Attractions? My unpublished novel about effort to save a drive-in movie theater was birthed while I was sitting in a drive-in movie theater. Usually in those places it’s not birth that’s going on, but conception.
Okay, maybe I do know where most of my ideas come from. The newest book, The No-Campfire Girls, can be traced easily to its source, which was an attempt by the Girl Scouts to shut down my wife’s beloved childhood camp.
I don’t use the word beloved lightly.
And she’s not the only one: A grass roots campaign sprung up, probably from the roots, of people across the area who wanted to save their camp. My wife and I came back from a visit determined to find a way to help them.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 