Musings of Two Creative Minds

     Today I want to discuss a setting and also a plot device I'm using.  Above you see the remains of a concrete ship.  Yes, you read correctly a ship partly made from concrete.  This vessel is the S. S. Palo Alto, built to serve in WWI when steel and metal supplies were becoming scarce.  She was part of a fleet of 12 experimental vessels.  Unfortunately, she was completed in 1919 after the war was over and made her only self-powered voyage to the San Francisco Bay Area.  There she sat for 10 years and was eventually purchased by an entertainment company and towed to Seacliff near Santa Cruz.  Once she came here, she was refitted and turned into an entertainment showcase.  An arcade, fine dining, a bar, even a pool was built inside of her to the pleasures of her many visitors.  The middle photo above is a model replica of her in those glory days when she was known as "The Amusement Ship".  Unfortunately, two ye...

Greetings one and all.  I survived my first week of College, got all the classes I wanted and a nasty case of Heat Exhaustion.  Doing better now, but it has been quite an experience.  Which brings me to today's topic... A lot of people wonder where can they find inspiration, settings, characters to write about.  My answer is, look back on your life.  You may not think you've led a very interesting life or maybe you've been all over the place and have had numerous adventures and wouldn't know where to start.  In either case, you have a wealth of material to draw upon. For example, in my novel I chose upstate Connecticut.  My grandmother lived there for many years and the place always fascinated me.  She was caretaker for a famous architect who owned a mansion there, that dated back to the 1600's.  Beyond the mansion was a 100 foot hill with a little cottage at the top.  While near the house my grandmother lived in was a large kennel, ...