Does it ever happen that you’ve been giving someone good advice and you suddenly realize you need to take it yourself?

That happened to me this week. Having been cracking a whip over the head of a writing friend and encouraging her to take time daily for fiction writing, I realized I was far more guilty than she of letting my fiction projects congeal on a cold burner.

So I turned on the heat under my current adult novel, Living Echoes, and incorporated a scene that had come to me during my recent travels to Synod.

This is an excellent example of why writers should always carry a notebook with them. There’s something particularly productive about long trips, when one’s mind has the opportunity to explore back-brain thoughts.

If I hadn’t jotted down that thought when it came to me, somewhere along the interstate in Pennsylvania, it would have been eclipsed by subsequent events and long lost.

But I found it in my notebook and wrote it into my manuscript, where it seems like the perfect solution to a plot problem that had been plaguing my subconscious.

And that means I’m still echoing along on Living Echoes.