People often ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” Neil Gaiman said, “I make them up… Out of my head.” Robertson Davies said, “I don’t get them; they get me.” Some authors say something visual – a news clip on TV or a magazine article—might spark an idea. Some say their ideas come from other people, other industries, the act of writing, or God. Confession: my ideas come from nowhere. Yup, they just appear. Out of nowhere. Well, okay. Maybe the idea rises from some misty spot in my subconscious mind—the unknown world where anything is possible, where I’m still a child bursting with wonder and a sense of possibility, asking “What if…?” or “I just want to see if there’s another world over that hill…” When I was a child growing up in Canada, we often visited a family friend, an eye surgeon who lived in a palatial mansion full of spiral staircases and hidden rooms. I loved getting lost in that old house—I often expected to tumble through a door into Narnia. But I didn’t need to explore a mansion to find magic. The forest trail right behind our house led me to a giant, spongy moss…