Jude’s Blog

I found out something interesting today. My great-grandfather was Le Roy Liebermann (AKA Leroy William Liebermann), and he was 30 years old in 1920 (so he was born in 1890). He was living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania then. My great-grandmother left him sometime after that census and changed her name along with their son’s, so we have no idea what happened to Le Roy during the rest of his life. He could have gotten married and had more kids. If any of this sounds familiar to anyone, please get in touch with me. I’d like to know if I have any Liebermann relatives.

If you ever met your favorite writer, what would be the first question you would ask?  Let me guess, it would be, “Where do you get all those ideas?”  I’m probably not alone when I say that no writer likes to answer that question.

Why?  Because we don’t know, and it’s very hard to explain that to someone who has no idea what that means.  Book ideas can come from many different places.  They can either be a memory of something bad that happened, and we want to set it straight.  It could be a movie we watched or a book we read that we feel we could do better. It could be something we glimpsed in a park that sparked our imagination.  Or it could simply be as if someone else were writing through us, a muse if you will. We don’t know where we get our ideas.  They just come to us.

Still, I know I would have to bite my tongue if I ever met my favorite author, since the temptation would be there to ask her that dreaded question.  Even though I know the answer, just maybe she knows some hidden truth that has eluded me.  Not likely, but maybe.