I often get asked how I come up with story ideas. Where does my inspiration come from? I wish I had a solid answer for that. Because it would make it a lot easier to come up with something new for my next book.

It’s not the same formula for each book. For The Trouble with Mr Pretty, I had a dream of a scene and quickly wrote it down when I woke up before I forgot it. That scene turned into a story. I thought I’d only write one book. But then while writing The Trouble with Mr Pretty, secondary characters I wrote in that story put their hands up and said, ‘excuse me, I want a book too!’. And that’s how Chasing Trouble and Trouble in Disguise (book to be released soon) were born.

Other times, a sentence will randomly pop into my mind and I’ll work from that. This is the sentence that’s started the story I’m working on at the moment and I must tell you, I had no intentions of writing anything for a while because I was out of ideas.

Here it is:

If Holly had a dollar every time someone called ‘how much?’ to her as she walked through Sydney streets, she’d have a first-class plane ticket to the Bahamas.  😊

That’s it. That’s all it took for me to wonder… what’s going on? What is she dressed in for people to call out? Why is she dressed like that? And the questions kept coming along until a story idea formed.

So, ideas and inspirations can come from anywhere and everything. The books I read, the TV shows and movies I watch all work their way into my brain and eventually spit stories out.