A question many writers are often asked is "where do you get your ideas from?" The answers are many and varied such as having a secret address they send $10 to and get an idea returned in the mail or secret assignations behind a kebab shop.
One place where I often find inspiration for story ideas is monitoring markets for short story anthologies. The editors of intending anthologies can come up with some weird, wonderful and interesting themes. One that has really caught my attention of late is Rock & Roll is Dead: Dark Tales Inspired by Music. It doesn't pay a lot, but a lot of anthologies aren't big paying markets. But they are great developmental markets all the same.
I have been having some fun trawling through my CD collection, looking for tracks that fire the imagination for a suitably dark story. Leading the pack at the moment is Dark Night by The Blasters that was used in the Tarantino film, From Dusk Till Dawn. It has a deliciously dark feel to it that has the inspiration neurons bouncing around although I have not settled on anything. But there are other tracks giving me ideas as well such as Killer by Queen, 57 Deathtrip (I cannot remember the band off the top of my head), Space Trucking (Deep Purple), Ghostriders (who hasn't recorded that) and more.
There are also a couple of werewolf and were-creature anthologies on the go as well, giving me food for thought. That has given me the excuse to have some interesting reading of a anthology of werewolf mythology etc. Unfortunately I keep getting sidetracked by this utterly ridiculous idea of trying to write something about a werefrog.
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