Paranoia

In the years prior to our meeting, hubby and his roommates had the movie channels on cable.  Hubby took advantage of this and taped a lot of movies that he wanted to see but wasn't interested in buying (and he buys a LOT of DVDs, and now Blurays.)  As a result, not only did we have a huge DVD collection when we moved in together, we had a large collection of taped movies on VHS.

VHS, remember those?  Yeah, we're hoping to forget soon, too.  Hubby's been in purge mode these past few months, and the VHS tapes are on the way out.  He's burning DVDs of personal stuff we want to keep, and we've been progressively watching the movies (he doesn't want to just throw them out, after all the work that went into gathering them in the first place.)  And boy, am I ready to be done with them.  I miss high definition!

One of the movies we just watched was The Arrival, a 1996 flick starring Charlie Sheen as an astronomer who discovers alien life--and the deadly secrets they brought with them.  He gets to be pretty crazy as the paranoia sets in (and if everyone were out to get you, you'd be paranoid too.)  As it turned out, both hubby and I had seen it before, though I didn't remember it until I saw the way the aliens legs moved.  It was a decent movie and we both enjoyed it--and we enjoyed discussing it.

I was expecting no such thing, but we watched this movie at the perfect time to inspire my writing.  In my novel (I still don't have a name for the thing, I really need to get on that) my protagonist seeks the help of a conspiracy theorist because he's the only one who will believe what really happened.  I just got to the chapter in my revisions where we first meet him.  I think he's pretty strong in most regards:  I worked to make his writing style unique (we see his writing a lot) and his apartment is suitably paranoid--but after watching The Arrival I realized that I hadn't put enough suspicion and paranoia into his behavior and interactions.  As a result, I've been rewriting his scenes and enjoying myself in the process.  I love it when inspiration comes at just the right moment.

In other news, I got an encouraging rejection the other day requesting that I send more.  I'm now debating which story should go to them when next it comes back to me.  Too bad the story they nicely rejected is running out of markets.

How about you?  What was your favorite time when life stepped in and helped writing with which you were struggling?