Sounds cliched, but I get inspiration from everywhere. From music, to books, films, drawings and places, I get inspired by many things. Most of my inspiration, however, comes from real life: people that I meet, experiences that I’ve had, a ray of sunshine on an auburn lock of hair on a friend’s head during French class… I like to daydream. Constantly. And almost anything mundane can become romantic and thrilling in my head, once I’ve grabbed a thought and run with it. Girls become princesses and nobles, flowers symbolise love, growing everywhere, and even the smallest remark can bite and sting, depending on how it was delivered. Things from real life get twisted and romanticised to the point of hardly being recognised as a memory or resembling reality; that is what inspires me to write, as I can live things twice, and put a different play on things that seemed unimportant – or decidedly very important – at the time.
Trips to countryside houses always generate ideas. Could there be a mysterious intrigue, a forbidden romance, inside its halls? Was the castle home to vampires, or fairies? Music that I listen to on the way helps (I’m a huge fan of Malice Mizer, and their music provides me with lots of inspiration, especially the album Bara no Seidou, which is like the soundtrack to a future novel that I have planned out).
Right now I’m very inspired by film. A sequence of events, or imagery, in films can be that final cog inside my mind, that prompts me to write and tells me how to progress a scene. Stuck? Look at a film of a similar genre to show you how one scene cuts to lead to another, and progresses the story. Favourite films include dark and gritty, taboo subjects and forbidden loves set in a historical background, such as Les Amities Particulieres (1964), Madchen in Uniform (1931), For a Lost Soldier (1992), and Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971). Most of the films that inspire me are European, and often quite old, for rather than a blatant, obvious romance, we are faced with little hints and clues that you have to piece together to make sense in the context of LGBT love. I like films and books subtle, so that I can read between the lines.