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One of the questions most commonly asked of writers is "Where do you get your ideas?"  Some smart-mouthed writers quip, "The Idea Warehouse."  Which is dumb because everybody knows ideas come from the Idea Fairy.

I suspect our silly answers arise from the fact we don't often know where ideas come from.  Oh sure, sometimes you succumb to an opium-induced dream--who hasn't, right?--and jot it all down in a fevered Xanadu rush only to be interrupted by your Twitter account notifying you that you have one new reply and you abandon your opus to see what somebody was saying about you. 

But for me, I often find that ideas come together more like a dung beetle's ball.  I get some crap; I roll it around for awhile.  Stuff sticks to it.  It starts to take shape and starts rolling a little faster.  The eggs incubating inside it eventually hatch, along with a few random seeds, and, look, I have a story!  This is less sanitary and more effort than the "came to me in a dream" version, but more (ha) organic and gives me the illusion of control. 

Of course, if you've seen nature show footage of dung beetles at work, you know that control is probably tenuous at best.  And by the end of the process--with baby dung beetles running around and unidentified seedlings sprouting everywhere--it's hard to look at the scattered clumps of elephant poop, dirt and dried grass and say, see, there's where the idea started.  Plus, who wants to look that closely?

Perhaps I'm pushing this analogy too far.  But Seduced by Shadows, my debut urban fantasy romance, came together in just such a messy way.  Maybe it started with one sticky question: Are people basically good or basically evil?  Philosophers and college kids staying up too late in their dorm rooms have debated the issue for a couple thousand years and not gotten any farther than "Who wants to make the next pizza run?"  But also mixed in was my interest in the beliefs from other world religions and cultures.  The idea to infect my heroes with repentant demons and make them wrestle with the implications of the evil inside them got rolled in there somewhere early on.  Having a sexy, brooding hero is a no-brainer for a paranormal romance writer; but choosing which kind of sexy, brooding hero is trickier than you'd think, and I had to do some brooding of my own along with surfing the ‘net for pictures of sexy, brooding men.  (Ah, I love this job!)  Throw in a brave heroine to challenge my brooding hero, a villain to make them sweat, a passion to make them sweat some more, and before long, those disparate elements were a tangled mess of 100,000 words with no discernable beginning or end.  (Well, 400 pages later there's The End.)

With the help of a wonderful critique group, a respected writing contest and a spectacular editor, I look now at Seduced by Shadows with its glossy cover and polished text and think, wow, where did that idea come from?  Clearly, the Idea Dung Beetle.

Because you know, the dung beetle is depicted more charmingly as the sacred scarab of Egyptian mythology, associated with the god Khepri, whose name means "to come into being."  Sounds sort of like "it came to me in a dream," doesn't it?  And maybe the Idea Fairy is okay with that analogy after all.

I love words, but I also get a lot of ideas from imagery.  So I'd like to share some of the images that inspired Seduced by Shadows.

And finally, here are some images that I hope inspire you to read SEDUCED BY SHADOWS.

Check in on my contest page for a chance to win a signed copy of Seduced by Shadows.

Jessa Slade, Seduced by Shadows, Marked Souls, paranormal romance, Signet