Tuesday Writing Thoughts: I Walk Therefore I Write

This morning I took a walk half-way down the block. I walked east from my apartment going toward Eastern Avenue. I walked down to the point across my old apartment building I lived in fifteen or twenty years ago. It is a two story apartment building painted puke green. The windows are boarded up and the court yard is mostly cement with a few dying weeds around the edge. There are also dying weeds in front of the building. 

That building is part of a two building complex. Each building is two stories high and both are painted the same color. That complex is obviously condemned. I want to use the complex or one of the buildings in a story, but I am not sure what kind of story. The courtyard would be a good setting for a mystery of some type. The apartments themselves might make a good place for squatters or a ghost story. I could also use my memory of the apartment Mom and I lived in for the setting of a story. However, I like the idea of using the complex as it is now for part of a plot. 

Monday Motivation: Monday Story Ideas

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

This morning began really slow, but I did find some story ideas in my slow beginning and the slow pace of the web this morning. I don't know why my browser was so slow. It could have been the weather or it could have been the creatures in cyberspace. I like the creature in cyberspace idea because it leaves a lot of room for any genre of story. A story about the weather effecting the speed of the internet works as well, but that suggest a science fiction story while the creatures in cyberspace suggest a horror story.

This afternoon my browser is running at its normal speed. The wind has also picked up here in Las Vegas. No, I don't think one has to do with the other. That is a good story idea though. I'm sitting at my desk looking out my front door (my studio apartment has only one door leading to the outside) at the pine tree across the street. The variable wind is blowing through the branches and sounds like the waves washing onto a beach. The birds are singing while litter and leaves are blowing down or up the street depending on the direction of the wind.

My neighbors are home, but then my neighbors are at home most of the time. Right now they are talking and playing music both, of which, I can hear through the walls of my apartment. I have to say that apartment living encourages understanding and forgiveness. I think I could write a story about those two attributes as well. I could also write about the people walking by my apartment who stop in front of my door and talk to each other. I love apartment living because it encourages my muse to come up with story ideas.