People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” which I always find curious: where instead of how. “How” seems more understandable: as if there might be a method, or a discipline, or a certain mindset that could be acquired; the way one acquires the mindset of a meditator, say, which certainly takes great diligence and patient practice.  A person who’s done sitting meditation for twenty years is going to have a very different mind than when s/he first hunkered down cross-legged.  So “how” seems very valid.

But maybe “where” is the better question: it’s certainly more mystical, and maybe that mystery brings it closer to the real limbic – or do I mean liminal – state where – yes, where the ideas germinate, or float in, or infiltrate, or seep. So maybe it’s the better, truer, more practical question. Someone asked me the other day, “How come you decided to write a historical novel about a whorehouse?” Where did that whorehouse come from, with its black poppy signage?  Where the passionate heroes? Where the silent madam? I had no answer because I don’t know; I never know; I never do any of this consciously.

Desire pulls the strings. Maybe meditation is the best model after all. Where do you get your ideas? Yes.