How do you find your inspiration?

Everyday I read and see things that inspire me. It could be something I see on television, a book or newspaper article I’ve read, a conversation I overhear in a shop, or a picture I find on the net.

A few weeks ago I found the picture below and immediately had to start writing. Yes, there are more pressing stories I need to be working on so I didn’t overdo it, just wrote the first few thousand words and left it at that. But, the characters keep talking to me(and no snarky comments about what hearing voices is a sign of thank you very much). So, when I finish the Bollywood novel and the next two shifter books I’m working on,(hopefully in the next couple of weeks) I will be writing Declan Hardy’s story.

Declan is a merman who believes he is the last of his kind. Every year, on exactly the same date he returns to Copenhagen, to the place he met Liam, his one and only love. He doesn’t expect to find anything, returning mostly out of habit, but when a tourist inadvertently snaps a picture of a mermaid tail in the murky waters of Copenhagen harbour, Declan quickly comes to realise that everything he held true for the last one hundred years was a lie.

He enlists the help of reclusive wizard Malaki to help solve the mystery of the disappearance of the merpeople. If he can find out what happened to Liam and the rest of his kind, Declan may finally get the closure he craves, but Malaki is a recluse for a reason. The past the wizard is hiding from could hold the answers Declan has been searching for, but when he finds himself falling in love with Malaki and has the possibility of a future with him, just how important are those answers? And if Liam is alive after all, how will he ever choose between them?

I love reading about what inspires people and I know that a lot of other authors out there use pictures in this way. When I started writing, I never looked at pictures for inspiration, I got the idea for a character or characters and just went with it. Sometimes it was a story idea or a scene that came to mind and I shaped and molded my characters to fit. How do you get your inspiration? Do you use pictures in this way? Are your characters born from a picture you discovered, or do you imagine your characters first and find a picture that fits?

I know they say a picture is worth a thousand words, well, to me, this picture is worth a whole book full of words and I'm eternally grateful to the artist(whoever they may be) for creating it. You have, truly inspired me.