Barb Caffrey's Blog

Folks, I suffer from migraines, as my late husband Michael also did . . . and what I’ve found over time is that out of my migraine-induced haze, I often get some really interesting story ideas out of it.

Take ELFY, for example.  I had been reading an anthology the night before and someone had been describing the worst of the urban fantasy genre — the mincing Faeries that seemed like human courtiers rather than anything alien or Other, that humans always outwitted these lesser-minded sorts, and so on and so forth — and all of that mixed up in my mind while under the influence of my migraine.

The next day (or maybe evening), I realized I had a character in my head: Bruno the Elfy.  He liked to wear black, unlike his compatriots who wore all sorts of wild colors; he didn’t like to rhyme, unlike the rest of the Elfys.  And he was stuck in the Human Realm — our Earth — because he’d been told one thing but the truth was something else again.  Unraveling what the truth was took me a good year’s worth of work and a whole lot of conversations and editing done by my late husband and co-conspirator, Michael, before we had a completed book.

So even though I really don’t enjoy migraines, I do sometimes receive ideas of worth and value . . . and I look at it like this: make lemonade from whatever lemons you might be handed, if at all possible.  (Sometimes it’s not.)

At any rate, am I all alone in this phenomenon?  Or has anyone else come up with a good story idea or two on the way back out of a migraine headache?