When ideas just come to you out of nowhere

Great news! I started work today on the fourth Covington mystery, as yet untitled. When completed, it will be my fifth novel overall.

I only wrote one chapter today, but it's an important one. It's what I call the "set-up" chapter that lays out in a general way the story that is to follow. The way it came to me is interesting, I think, and I wanted to share it with you here.

So I woke up this morning with a word stuck in my brain. The word sounded like "arrow-nell." I have no idea where that came from or what it means, if anything at all. Maybe it was something I dreamed about or something that was playing on my TV set when I fell asleep. Anyhow, it just got caught in there and I kept hearing it repeated in my brain. So I started thinking about it and then an idea struck me, so I sat down at my keyboard and started to write.

I had previously drafted a two-paragraph plot summary for Covington 4 so I used that idea and started typing words. The words became sentences and the sentences became paragraphs and before long the paragraphs became a narrative that was more than three single-spaced pages long.

And that word "arrow-nell?" Well that morphed into Arranelle and then to Anthanella and (SPOILER ALERT) that became the name of a key character in the book. I'm not telling you who she is or what role she plays, but in a few days I'll be making a presentation at the public library about how books come to be written. I'll tell them this story at that time, but as you can see, sometimes the answer to that questions is, "I don't know. It just came to me."