Valentine's in Barbados
You never know what will create the next ripple.
BARBADOS HERO — a personal photograph from Barbados: Nikki and Quentin together, the beach, or the coast. Place and memory, not a tourism advertisement.
Sometimes work takes you somewhere beautiful.
Quentin came with me on a trip to Barbados over Valentine's Day, turning a work trip into a few stolen hours together on the beach and one of those dinners you don't forget.
NIKKI + QUENTIN / BEACH — the two of them together in Barbados, preferably at the beach: the memory they made during what would otherwise have been a work trip.
We spent Valentine's Day at The Cliff, tucked into the cliffside overlooking the Caribbean, eating an incredible five-course dinner with the ocean below us.
THE CLIFF / VALENTINE'S DINNER — Nikki and Quentin at dinner, the restaurant built into the cliff, their table over the ocean, or the five-course dinner. Personal photographs only.
It wasn't a research trip.
I wasn't looking for a story.
But that's the thing about stories.
You never know what will create a ripple in your mind. A face across a room. Something a stranger says. A town name on a road sign. An object in a museum. A place. A photograph. A name you hear once and can't quite forget.
Ideas manifest everywhere.
Sometimes they creep in slowly.
Sometimes they arrive all at once.
That night, I walked into a bathroom at The Cliff and saw an enormous round mirror surrounded by light.
I looked at my reflection.
And there it was.
An idea.
Immediate.
Something about that mirror created a ripple in my mind, and almost instantly, a story began forming around it.
So, naturally, I took a selfie.
That's the strange thing about inspiration.
You can't schedule it. You can't know what will trigger it.
A place can inspire a setting.
A stranger can leave behind a character.
A name on a sign can find its way into a novel.
An object can become a plot.
And apparently, a bathroom mirror in Barbados can start a story.
Maybe that's what Windows is really about.
The things I see while I'm out living my life that somehow find their way into the things I write.
You never know what will create the next ripple.
You just have to notice when it starts.