I love my Mac.

For the PC users among you, Mac has a feature called dashboard, and on it a widget called stickies. My dashboard is a virtual rainbow of digital stickies with plots, characters and places to investigate for settings.

Many times, like when those characters cross my path (like the grocery store) or you find yourself in a situation. It winds up on a sticky waiting to be used.

The lovely thing about where I live is that I sit almost an equal distance from Chicago as I do to Milwaukee. Wisconsin’s state line is just a twenty minute drive, and the hamlets just across the border are a priceless resource for settings and if you watch your surroundings long enough and turn the imagination up a bit, you’ve got a story.

One fall weekend we had a gift certificate to stay at a gasthaus in one of those hamlets. It was built to look like a German/Swiss chalet and was decorated like one inside as well with genuine knick-knacks and furnishings. The gentleman who ran the b&b was a widower who built the place with is wife. It was still raw for him. We met another couple checking in and had dinner with them in town. A younger couple joined us much later, when I was about ready for bed. However, I stayed up later because I watched the dynamics of this young family and the more I observed, the more I questioned. When one of the children crawled into my lap and I read him a book on my iPad, more thoughts zoomed through my mind.

I didn’t sleep much that night because I wondered why two young children under the age of four wanted nothing to do with their mother? Because she wasn’t their mother? My ideas went down on the stickies. The plot will slowly appear. Someday. I saw that for a reason.

With spring coming, I checking my maps (yes, I still refer to paper maps – LOVE them!) and deciding which ones are worth a sunny  Sunday drive with the camera bag in the back seat. Time for fun research, and pretty much free too.

Settings are out there waiting to be discovered and plots will find a way of unfolding before me.