The window from my hotel room high on the tenth floor offered a truly spectacular view over the city of Lisbon whatever time of day or night.
Awake early, I pulled back the heavy curtains and my eyes were immediately drawn across shadowy trees in the park below to a sinister block of a building with brilliant red warning lights on its roof, flashing in unison every few seconds.
In the half-light before dawn their brightness and intensity was strangely unnerving.
No matter we were close to the landing path for Lisbon airport, it triggered my imagination and helped me complete a short description I had already penned as part of an early chapter in my novel 'Flood Waters Down'.
Tulip Haven’s twin towers, once giant cooling chimneys, still dominated the otherwise featureless landscape for mile upon mile in every direction. During the hours of darkness the building’s angular and functional architecture loomed menacingly, its red warning lights blinking in unison.
To the casual onlooker their brightness and intensity seemed to convey a strange sense of hidden power, as if from a sinister lighthouse overseeing a forbidden landscape and somehow delivering a subversive message to humanity itself.
So, if you are a budding writer or author, my message is always take ideas from what you see in your everyday environment.
Develop a writer’s eye and jot down some free-flow prose whilst observing your surroundings. You never know where a moment’s inspiration might take you.
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Note: This author is seeking contact with agents or publishers for his first novel Flood Waters Down, a dystopian thriller set in the Fens of eastern England, a first draft of which is now almost complete.
A reviewer of some initial chapters described it as "extremely evocative” with a "poetic and atmospheric writing style" that draws the reader "with a sense of unease and anticipation".
Make contact here: Clive Simpson
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