Inspiration, for me, seems to happen when I travel. My brain doesn't see anything familiar. Every sign gets read, every turn is a decision, and nothing is ignored. My mind works overtime processing it all, which is probably why I can remember years of driving to work but almost nothing memorable about any single commute.
Foreign countries amplify that feeling. Translating should be an Olympic sport because it's exhausting. To anyone living where your first language isn't the local one, you have my respect.
My kids and I visited the Grand Canyon for the first time, and we stayed inside the park to make the experience as immersive as possible. I still remember how the light never seemed to settle. Clouds drifted overhead, painting moving shadows across the canyon walls. It wasn't what I expected. I imagined a fixed postcard view, but in person it behaved like a living scene that never stopped changing.
Standing at the rim, the view is almost impossible to describe. You can admire it for hours, and not get tired of taking it all in.
Now, you'd think that was the essential memory moment.
It wasn't.
It was the hiking trails.
When you're walking down those switchbacks, watching the trail unravel below you while people farther ahead are already thousands of feet lower, something changes. You stop thinking of it as a giant hole in the ground.
It's more like a mountain with the top cut off and the inside carved away.
Some perspective. I'm from Florida, where the average elevation is about one hundred feet above sea level. Imagine my surprise when I learned the rim of the Grand Canyon sits at around 8,000 feet. That reality didn't really sink in until we started down those wall-hugging trails.
The texture of the rocks. The loose dirt beneath your boots. The quiet awareness that it really is that far down if you slip. You don't simply see the canyon anymore. You feel it. You're inside it.
And as you've probably guessed, going back up was an entirely different conversation. It's the ultimate stair climber. Every step upward makes you question whether you really needed to go quite that far below.
But it was worth every step.
That trip set a milestone in my mind — one I still measure new experiences against. The more visceral an experience, the more likely it is to leave behind a seed of imagination that eventually blooms on the author's page. And it doesn't have to be a wonder of the world. Sometimes the smallest moments leave the deepest impressions.
That's when memories of the Grand Canyon started becoming an island called Canyon Myst.
When writing the journey through the jungle of Canyon Myst, there comes a point where the crew faces one final climb. They're dehydrated, exhausted, dressed for high altitudes instead of a suffocating rainforest, and somewhere below them they can hear the jungle waking up.
I needed a scene where the danger couldn't simply exist; it had to feel as constant as gravity.
Because gravity feels different when you're standing on the edge of a cliff.
Every muscle stays tense. Two fingers pinching a rock for balance becomes comfort. Even breathing feels deliberate and measured. Mortality starts to feel borrowed, as though one careless step could prove it always was.
But what if the scene could be more than a place? What if there were also an adversary? Not just impossible terrain, or the exhaustion of climbing. But something hunting you while every step upward demanded everything you had left.
And for the added intensity, I chose predator cats of the jungle. Later in the story, the jungle cats are replaced with true villains.
In this regard, inspiration has many forms, not just the beautiful moments, but also the dark matter from memories I'd rather leave behind.
A bully from high school. A toxic relationship. We've all got those characters in our lives. You can probably see where I'm going with this.
I've found it surprisingly cathartic to build villains from the people I couldn't overcome when I was younger. It's never enough for me to write that a character is simply evil. I want to understand how they justified becoming that person. What did they tell themselves? What wound did they carry? When did they first choose a path of harming others?
Understanding a villain doesn't excuse what they've done. It just makes the conflict honest. And, evil doesn't arrive with a preview of intentions. More often, it arrives convinced it's doing the right thing.
Sometimes the villain loses. We all like that.
But sometimes they win.
And every so often, learning their story makes you question who the real villain was.
As Canyon Myst slowly reveals itself, the villains may not seem so bad at first.
But what if they are?
What if they're far worse than you've imagined?
There are details already slipping through the cracks of that journey for anyone paying attention. And the characters who chose a dark path of corruption and scheming are about to discover something the Grand Canyon taught me all those years ago.
Going down is the easy part. The climb back up never is.