One of the most interesting things about reading short stories is - as both an author and a reader - the ''why" of the story.
I get my ideas from a lot of places, many of them my personal experiences. You've read about one of my idea-getting methods in previous posts. But here's another. Take a personal experience and tweak it - make it must worse, or much more fantastic than the actual experience. Change the names to protect the innocent, and maybe change the place and the time frame -- or maybe not.
In Beneath a Wild Sky - the story 'Honeymoon from Hell' is actually based on my first honeymoon! I went to Acapulco. I saw the cliff divers. I went parasailing, and I went for a scuba dive and had no air in my tank. But nobody was trying to kill me.
And unfortunately there was one more thing that went wrong with that trip: I became horribly sea sick on a deep sea fishing cruise when we were taken out by a crew we met on the beach. The next morning, the sea was very rough, even in Acapulco Bay. We're talking six foot waves! slamming our fishing boat down into the next trough, with water splashing over the sides.
Unfortunately I had eaten a BIG breakfast because we weren't sure when we'd get lunch. WHOA.
Maybe that will be another story, included in my next anthology!
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