I often get that question about where the ideas come from for the things I write. Well, I’ve got a great example of how it works right now!

I am not responding to a question in this post, but want to share something I stumbled across today that I plan to spend a lot more time with later. I was changing the settings on one of my web browsers this morning, and came across the name of a search engine I had not heard of before.  It’s called wolframalpha.com, and I don’t know how I’ve missed it all this time. I read the brief description and almost deleted it because it said it was designed primarily for things like math, which of course, would explain just WHY I had missed it all this time. But, just out of curiosity, I entered my name in the engine to see what would happen.

It gave me an idea for a story!

I’m not sure what that story is yet, but I know it’s there. You can see it in the little image I’ve used for this blog post. It is a chart that displays part of the results of the wolframalpha.com search for my name. This chart displays the global “Rank” of the use of my first and last name from 1880 to 2017. Not all that interesting, you say? I thought that too, until I noticed that humongous drop in the line representing the use of the name “Jamison” there around 1948-1950 or so. The chart explains that the lower the rank means the more popular the name (don’t ask me why), so now I wonder, what happened sometime around 1948-1950 that caused that name to become such a HUGE name? It may be nothing, but what if?

And, “what if” is all that we need as the seed for a good story. I need to do some more searching and digging, add a little imagination and maybe a few more “what ifs”, and who knows? We may have a pretty good story.

And, that’s where the ideas come from.

I’m going to spend some more time on http://wolframalpha.com this weekend. If you check it out, let me know if you find any “what ifs”!

By the way, does anyone have any insight into what happened with the name “Jamison” back there between 1948 and 1950? Gee, I was born in 1952, do you think…nah…that was too late.