Where do you get your ideas?

Dame Agatha Christie said that one of the questions she was frequently asked and hated was, "Where do you get your ideas?"

No one ever asks me that. Or at least, not the way people asked Dame Agatha. If anyone does ask me it is more likely going to be because they wonder or worry about my sanity.

Of course, the John of the Cross mystery idea came to me because I studied and taught about him and his life for over a quarter of a century. The central story about the disturbed novice master in the novel was based on historical testimony, and many of the names and other incidents mentioned in the mystery were historically accurate. Not the murders, of course.

The Elijah book and the Gratian book also came from my years with the Carmelites and my study of those two figures. But those two books pass as nonfiction, and it is always easier (I think) to come up with ideas for nonfiction.

As for the WhoVille novel and stories, however, I do not know what to say. 

They are rooted to some degree in my years in Hyde Park working on campus at the University of Chicago and later at the downtown campus of Loyola University. But only in the most tangential way. Certainly Philip Peabody Horton University and its misfits have no connection with those two august institutions of higher learning. Fictional Barona [Verona] is somewhat connected to Hyde Park, but it is equally connected with every small college town in America.

The stories just popped into my head from somewhere. As for the Honorian patriarch story, again, who knows? I tied it to WhoVille for the sake of the books, to be honest. Clearly it has a Chicago setting, and the fictional Honorian community is based on an actual heresy in the first Christian millennium. But the silly plot itself is just a product of misfiring neurons in my brain.

Thanks for not asking!