I cannot believe it's the 13th!

Nearly forgot once again, but this time I had an excuse - the Swine Flu or Influenza A - this is my first day out of bed after two days of hoping for death and one day of realizing I would live.
Soooo....what do I have to say? I don't know, maybe appreciate what you got? Seems kind of trite. I do appreciate what I have and so do most of the people I know. Life is very short and bittersweet precisely because we know it's short. Would I live forever? Nah...but if I could eat all the chocolate I wanted and still have a supermodel body, enjoy lots and lots of amazing sex, be super healthy and flit from one adventure to another while raising great kids and being flush with cash...oh, and staying around 30 years of age - I might consider living a little longer than the normal human lifespan. And if the fates could throw in a dynamite singing voice - that would be icing on the cake!
That is why I like books. Reading and writing them. Our characters can be anything we want them to be. A man trapped in a mirror can be 500 years old, a thousand years old - no big stretch. We can be vampires, shifters, were wolves, fairies, elves. No dream is too big or too unrealistic. We can disappear into J.R.R. Tolkein's world of the rings and be utterly enthralled. Or we can spend days with George R.R. Martin or Tad Williams or C.S. Lewis.
I learned when I was just a kid that the skull is merely an artificial barrier separating our outer self from our inner self. Anywhere we can go out there, we can go in here. Chances are that the universe stretches unto infinity, well, so do our imaginations. There is no limit to where our thoughts can take us.
So, since I can't do much today but hang out, I think a little Lord of the Rings is called for so I can coo over Legolas, drool over Aragorn, and shiver at the magic of Gandalf.

Where do you get your ideas?

A question that authors invaribly get from readers and interviewers alike is
"Where do you get your ideas?"

Of course, that is a silly question. Where does any of us get any ideas? Where did Edison get his idea for the light bulb? Where did Barbara Bradford get her ideas for the romance she wrote about? Where did your son/daughter/niece/nephew get the idea to color a garden on the kitchen wall?

The answer, "From our imaginations, of course."

The better question might be: "What inspired your imagination to put the ideas together in the pattern and in the series of events as you did to create the novel you wrote/the invention you created/the art work you manifested?"

Of course, but the time you get done saying the question, it is so long and lengthy, the person being interviewed has yawned, gone for coffee, and forgotten who she was talking to. And the questioneer has forgotten the purpose of the question.

So, perhaps, we should just stick with the tried and true.

Madam Author? Where did you get your idea?