Inspiration and ideas for my stories are often straightforward. A recent trip to St. Thomas gave me plenty of ideas and locations for Wood’s Justice and probably a Kurt Hunter Mystery. The Storm Thriller Series is also based on my travels. My time in the Keys gives me tons of fodder.
The trips give me the locations and some ideas—enough to get me started—until about the second page when I need to start embedding clues that foreshadow what is to come. I need the plot and the trigger points. That’s the point where I’ll take a dive into the history of the locations.
The internet is my first stop, but often gets me more confused than when I started. It does spark ideas though, which is what I’m really looking for. Digging further either gets me more confused or sends me down another rabbit hole.
That happened last week while writing Wood’s Justice. Through an unlikely association, I found myself at the Tampa History Museum, a twenty-minute bike ride from our house.
People often ask questions about some of my older books. My answer is truthful: I have no idea. I thought something was wrong with me until I heard this from several others too. Once I write something it is out of my head. The internet is like this. I’ll vaguely remember what I read, but the source and details are gone.
Museums are different. I can remember entire exhibits from when my grandfather used to take me to the Museum of Natural History when I was a kid. They also spark ideas and in the shipwreck display in the Tampa History Museum, I found one.
Treasure rarely lies in plain sight. It is usually in the form of a concretion which are built-up mineral deposits that fuse themselves to the precious metals salvors are after. Sometimes, the objects are partially exposed. This was the case in Wood’s Reward.
The display of concretions caught my eye. The silver ingot above is exactly what I imagined Mac and Wood discovering. Next to it was another concretion which gave me what I needed for Wood’s Justice. In my Tides of Fortune series, the crew hides their treasure in the ship’s ballast. It seemed logical to me but had no basis in fact. This copper concretion is the same but different. The ballast of a wooden ship is the gravestone of the wreck. I knew that the type of ballast was a clue to where the ship was built or had traveled from. For example, rounded stones meant a nearby river. I’d never heard of using copper for the entire ballast of ships returning from the New World.
That one exhibit gave me the clue that Mac finds in Wood’s Justice,
which kicks off the search for a long-lost Spanish Galleon.