What Inspires Me

Inspiration is defined as 'the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do with something creative.' I see inspiration all around me every day. For example, my mom inspires me with her unwavering passion to create the most beautiful quilts you have ever seen. She even added a quilting/sewing room onto her house a few years ago. It is the coolest space you have ever seen. She literally has one long wall of shelves filled with more material than a material store, I kid you not. She never stops buying material because patterns, colors, etc. inspire her to create. 

My dad is another person that inspires me. He started a very successful company well over a decade ago and even though he has semi-retired, that company is still going strong. My dad is one of the hardest workers I know next to my mom.

I am an avid, okay not avid, more like an addict when it comes to reading. The Professor comments nearly every day that he has never met anyone that reads as much as I do. I read because I love being immersed into another place, time, life, etc. It also inspires me to become a better writer and I am always learning from the books that I read. Reading is some of the best teaching for a person to become a better writer. Words are beautiful and powerful and when strung together in the right way, can evoke a myriad of emotions. I want to be that person that moves a reader, opens their mind up to something they may have never thought about, or opens their mind up about a completely different take on life.

The inspiration for several of my books have been some of the things I have managed to 'survive' throughout my life. You may ask, "Survive?" Yes, survive as my life has not been as easy as it may appear. I take snippets of my life and string them throughout all of the books I have written so far, though this is about to change in some of the new books I have ideas about writing. I also sprinkle in the various life patterns of some of the stories that other people have told me or that I have heard on television, social media, etc. I have heard it said that writers are story thieves and I now know what that means. 

Inspiration is all around us all of the time, we just have to stand still long enough to drink it in, mold it, make it our own, and then write about it.