I had in mind a substantial blog entry to make up for the brevity of the one I uploaded a couple of weeks ago. Best laid plans. Deadline pending. So, instead, I will continue with the series of posts revealing sources of inspiration for the individual stories in my new collection Swords, Magic, and Heart.

The short answer to the question “Where do you get your ideas?” is “I stare at a blank computer screen until I think of something.” But if I’m being honest, on most occasions when I sit down to think up something new, I don’t actually start from zero. There are always bits inside my metaphorical cortex that have been circulating for a while. Musings. Images. Trivia. Impressions. While staring at the blank screen, one of those may tumble out. If I’m lucky, that will be something I can use as a component to build upon until a coherent outline of a story comes into being. And so it was with the process of coming up with “The Ferryman,” originally written for Lace and Blade 5, edited by Deborah J. Ross.

This is how it went:

I was reading a family memoir in which the author, Esau Johnson, described how he had, at twelve years old in the year 1812, crossed the Wabash River by ferry to take a wagon load of the watermelons he had raised to the town of Vincennes to sell them. The fare was not cheap, even when reduced by a round-trip rate, but Esau was willing to pay because it gave him his window of opportunity at the Saturday market. The end result? Esau cleared almost a hundred dollars — a very handsome amount in that era even for an adult, and downright fabulous for a pre-teen kid. Moreover, he got to spend the money as he liked, because he had raised the melons on his own, without his family pitching in.

Now you would think I would be inspired to write about Esau. But no. He had told that tale, needing nothing more than memory and the actual events to generate it. What I did was picture the fellow who had taken him across the Wabash. By that, I don’t mean the real-life individual, whose name was James Gibson. The person I envisioned was a creature of fiction. What would it be like if one’s entire existence, day and night for years on end, was to ply a river, live upon it, be contained within its banks?

And so, from that spark, the tinder caught, the fire filled the hearth, and ultimately I had a story of a ferryman not on a river of the pioneer era of the Ohio Valley, but a mythic river of judgment. As it happens, I have told the tale of the genesis of “The Ferryman” twice before. Except in those versions, the spark was not the 1812 melon-merchant anecdote in Esau Johnson’s memoir, but other routes by which the character and setting came into view. There is no contradiction in that. A story can be launched by more than one catalyst, and so it was in this case.