Grit in the Oyster

 If you ask a writer where they get their ideas  from you're apt to get a hollow laugh. One reason is that it is a much too frequent question and the other is that we often have absolutely no idea. Things get scooped up and jumbled together in the subconscious and sometime later a book results. Or a bit of a book. Or a few lines. Or something. 

Take the very new and hardly fledged WIP. I have no clue why I decided that it would feature Egyptology. I mean, why Egyptology? Like I know anything about that? Fun finding out though - and it is getting modified a bit to make it more manageable - I'm not totally daft.  I just have this creepy scene in my head - in the dark with a lot of sarcophagi looming out of the murk and this ominous creaking noise ...

It has occurred to me though that, Egyptology aside, things can get absorbed - like grit in the oyster - and end up re-appearing in a modified form.  I've got two of those so far in said WIP.  When I was a guest on crime  writer Lorraine Mace's blog a while ago she asked about sites for dead bodies - crime writers have those sorts of conversations all the time - it tends to make for nervous spouses on occasion. I mentioned that I've always felt that the carrels in an academic library had distinct possibilities. In the evening with low lights on the quieter top floors. It hovered for a while and now, what do you know, there in the first chapter of the WIP ...

The other idea came out of an off the cuff exchange over Facebook with my favourite Cardiff jewellers about a hand over of some family opals in a cinema car park. (They have now been turned into a gorgeous brooch) The idea appealed to me and we joked about putting it in a book. Then the grit began to work. The WIP features a spectacular necklace. I am now pretty sure it will also be featuring some sort of exchange in a car park - although it will be on the Riviera, not a local cinema. I'm looking forward to explaining to a tour guide, when I finally get back to research trips, that deserted car parks are high on my list of "must visits" 

So - that's how two bits of grit might have got into the oyster. It remains to be seen if they emerge as pearls ...