Passing Fancies of Inspiration.

It seems, according to various articles I've read, people like to know the stories behind a book and how an author gets his/her inspiration. Generally, I don't ponder on my inspirations and it may be a touch dangerous to probe the workings of my mind, but I'm going to spill the secret of what motivated my book of short fiction, Passing Fancies.

The internet.
Yes, the world wide web is responsible for my collection of strange tales.  What, you say?  How did the internet inspire you?  A simple answer:  online writing groups, writing articles and Twitter.
Passing Fancies is a varied and odd collection of stories from short tales of 100 words or less to much longer narratives.  Much of the microfiction was written for a online writing group, Genre Shorties (where you write a tiny tale for a supplied prompt) and several of the longer stories were written for the Genre Creatives Challenge group.  Both of these groups can be found on Gather.com.

Two of the stories in the book, A Hand in his Pocket, and Time in a Box were thought up after I read posts by two online author friends.
A Hand in his Pocket came about after reading a post on how certain written phrases might appear if they were taken literally.  Example:  "He put a hand in his pocket", instead of "He put his hand in his pocket".  This gem of writing advice got me thinking, "Why would someone put a hand in his pocket if it wasn't his?" and my story, A Hand in his Pocket, was born, as were werewolves.  (Note:  I posted the original version of this story on Gather.com, but there is a re-written version in the book.)
Time in a Box has a far less complicated origin.  Another author friend was discussing writing exercises and how he was using photos for inspiration.  One of the photos he included in the article gave me my own bit of inspiration and a different view of time-travel.

Now for Twitter.  Two of the stories were directly inspired by Tweets and one story was born of frustration from a bad day of Twitter spam.
Veil of Tears germinated after someone tweeted about a spelling goof with the words, vale and veil and well, I think Die, Spam Die speaks for itself.
Conversation in the Country Club came about after I read a Tweet by Elmore Leonard (yes, the Elmore Leonard).  He was ruminating on how he wrote about the dark underbelly of life and commented how he thought it was more interesting than a conversation in a club.  I would like to point out I did not disagree with this observation, but the thought did occur to me, "it would depend on the conversation".  Hence, my story about a strange underbelly in a country club.

So now you know.  My twisted mind can warp even the most mundane observation.