Daddy, where do ideas come from?

     I know it has been some time since I have written anything new on here and I would like to start by apologizing for that.  I do have some very good excuses, but I will not bore you with the details.  It is safe to say that I have failed anyone who has been here to read new material and I hope to change that.  As a writer this is part of what I'm supposed to do, write.  So here it goes.  As a father there are many questions that I dread hearing.  I've heard a few of them so far such as: "Daddy, when will I be allowed to date?" "Daddy, who's going to teach me how to drive?" "Daddy, what would you do if I brought a boy home to meet you?"
     All of these questions usually come out of the blue and I'm sure there are more awkward and scary questions to come as my daughter approaches her thirteenth year, but one that I was never dreading and honestly never expected her to ask was: "Daddy, how do you get the ideas for your stories?"  To give a little background on why she decided at age twelve to inquire this of her father I can say that my daughter has been writing herself for a few years.  lately she has been writing mainly what she (and many other people) call fan fiction.  From what I have gathered from her description is when people who are interested in a show or movie or book series write their own stories based on these characters or characters they have spun off from the originals.  I can see that for her, just starting off, this would be a great way to get her feet wet in the world of writing.  She has told me about many of her stories and I guess she was dissatisfied with my level of interest in these and asked me why I wasn't more excited.  I explained that I felt maybe her time would be better spent making up original stories.  Hence, the question.
     Now I know that this is a question that I have read authors hate to get when they are doing question and answer sessions because there is not really a good solid answer to that and they usually end up regurgitating the same canned response every time the question is asked.  I can see how this would be a painful question to be asked over and over again, but luckily for me this was my first time.  This answer can go many ways because for everything we write there is usually an event or idea that inspired it and they are never the same and we never get them the same way.  I didn't answer her immediately and told her I needed to think about it.  It actually didn't take me long to decide how best to answer this query. I sat down at the keyboard to add to the story that I was then writing and the answer came to me.  My ideas do all come from one place.  It is a magical land called "What if?".  In the land of "What if?" situations that seem normal can be twisted around and made slightly more interesting. 
     For example, with the story "Brains" that I have posted here I was inspired one morning by my wife and daughter's conversations about the Twilight Saga.  It was amazing to me that an author could turn what is essentially at its root the story of Romeo and Juliet into a series about vampires and werewolves and get the whole world to go into a frenzy.  I made a joke to them about the fact that you could never see this with say mummies or zombies.  It would work as well.  Who thinks of zombies as sexy after all? In the magical land of "What if?" however I thought that it might be p;possible.  The story Innocent Child happened the same way.  I had been driving a particular stretch of road in rural Maine and saw a an area by a small brook and thought that I saw a child standing there.  I stopped and looked back, but it was only a trick of the light.  The image stuck with me and when I later visited the land of "What if?" I wondered what reason a child might have for being there by themselves.  I have the movie Interview with a Vampire to thank for the image of the small girl vampire because I feel that a Young Kirsten Dunst really brought that character to life.
     All that being said I know that there are more questions to come from my little girl and I'm sure some of them I'm going to hate to answer and for some she's going to hate my answer, but who knows one of those questions may come with me to the magical land of "What if?".  i wonder what she'll think if she ends up starring in one of my stories or novels.  I bet she'll demand royalties.