Where do you get your ideas?

I'm yearning for Siberia. It's immense. It's clean. It's beautiful. The squirrels have little pointy ears. And, in October at least, it hasn't gotten that cold yet (although I do remember an October snowfall when I was there).

The people (at least the ones I knew there) are kind and generous with their time when friends come to visit. One of my most treasured memories is being sung "Happy Birthday" -- in heavily accented English -- on my 29th birthday in a warm, bright, crowded Siberian living room. This was back in Soviet days; maybe things are different now.

Siberia was a strange mix of intense interest and interaction -- everyone's business was always everyone else's business -- and the frightening isolation. Even the biggest Siberian city, Novosibirsk, was not much more than a smudge in the endless forests.

I was thinking of Siberia when I started the story that eventually became my Clarion South pick-me-please story. I was remembering walking and walking amid endless forests as the sun went down. And I thought, There could be people who walk for a living. What would it be like to be one of those people? What kind of land would be good for walking? What kind of food? What kind of road? What would a walker think is important enough to live and die for?

And that, friend reader, is one example of where writers' ideas come from.