Inside an Author's Mind: Flight of Ideas

Authors, are you triggered by current events to incorporate the news into your writing? Readers, are you curious about the writing process? Here's a glimpse of how recent occurrences resulted in two poems.

The recent flurry of articles about the Chinese Spy Balloon set my creative juices afire. Analogies flittered, and synonyms cavorted through my mind.

Chinese, hmm, ah yes, Communist “red.”

Was the conveyance really a meteorologic device, or was it a “Trojan” horse carrying advanced spy devices, or was it somehow inserting Trojan malware into our internet?

And was the balloon a “carrier pigeon” to return the pilfered information to China?

The words sorted and arranged, condensed into a senryu format, and voila! Poem number one:


Military planes scrambled to disable the balloon as it crossed away from the US land mass and over the ocean. An F-22 shot it down with a single missile. Navy and Coast Guard crews now scurry to retrieve the bits for Quantico to analyze.

As I watched the drama, my imagination stirred; as the balloon “popped” and the surreptitious “weasel” drifted to the sea.

Another brain exercise, with resultant poem number two:

Are you inspired to write a story, paint a picture, mold a clay figure, or craft a song in response to reporting dispatches about local, national, and/or international incidents?

You can follow the Author on her Website or on Twitter.


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