Hello! It’s spooky season! And baking season! And sweater season! It’s spooky-sweater-baking season! This is my favorite time of year. I’m getting ready to start baking my way through this book — fun! I’m also gearing up to rip out an entire section of this sweater — less fun, but I wasn’t paying close attention to the chart, and it’s a new-to-me technique for knitting sweaters, and I’m learning.

Best of all, my new poem “Swimming the Witch” is now free to read at Trollbreath Magazine, for your spooky reading pleasure! This is a ragey little poem about how systems of power tend to create the very things they’re attempting to suppress. Read it and then go vote!

So, where do you get your ideas?

I get asked this question a lot, and I often struggle to answer it. I can talk about how a particular story or poem came to be, but ideas in general? That’s a bigger, more existential question. In response, I’ll say something about curiosity and paying attention to the world around you, and the person will just look at me with confusion, because I haven’t really answered their question at all.

But there’s another question I’ve been asked more than once, which has helped me contextualize the first one a bit. The second question goes like this: Would I be willing to collaborate on a book? The person asking this question will go on to tell me that they have an idea for a GUARANTEED BEST SELLER but they don’t have the time to write it, and they’re willing to split the profits with me, 50-50! So, do we have a deal?

Now, that’s a question that’s easy to answer. Because an idea, in and of itself, isn’t at all valuable. The truth is that for writers, the ideas are the easy part! I have ideas when I’m traveling or going to an art museum or attending a festival, or after I’ve had a really bizarre dream. I also have lots of ideas when I’m simply taking a walk around the neighborhood, when I’m in the shower, when I’m petting my cat. They flit into my head: what if…? or wouldn’t it be cool…? My notebook is filled with ideas — more ideas than I’ll ever have time to write.

But ideas aren’t stories. They’re just the spark. In order to turn an idea into a work of art, you have to sit down and write the darn thing. And writing isn’t just taking dictation from a muse; it’s work.

Writing is figuring out pacing and character arcs and backstory. It’s focusing on the minutia of words and sentences and paragraphs and flow. It’s researching whether a particular holiday fell on a weekday or a weekend seventeen years ago. It’s determining how much to show and how much to tell, and realizing you’ve used the phrase “he shrugged” over twenty times in your draft. It takes time, and it takes practice, and takes years.

And I think, now, that when someone asks me, “Where do you get your ideas?” what they’re asking about isn’t the idea itself — not really. It’s what’s been done to the idea, all the shaping and molding and tearing apart and rebuilding, everything that makes something fleeting and intangible into a story you can read, that makes you laugh or cry or rage or wonder. That’s what’s so amazing. That’s what makes all the work worth it.

Wishing you all a lovely autumn! And as a thank you for reading, here’s my cat tax.

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