Travel inspires me.
Did I ever tell you about the time I should have been murdered in Tahiti?
No? Just youthful stupidity while traveling alone—the story is boring, really there were only five locks and bolts on the door…I got lucky. The predator wasn’t really in the mood to hunt, etc. but in its after-math, the experience inspired a great serial killer plot.
That was during my first solo trip abroad. I had a freshly minted passport calling my name and a determination to get it stamped before the last days of my teenage years waned.
It was the stuff of novels:
I’ve turned nineteen under a giant moon, trailing my toes in the surf on Bora Bora, a bottle of Moet in one hand. Crystal waters in hidden pools beckon me to live dangerously and I’m misplaced by the hotel staff. I bury myself alive on an atoll—hiding from the sun’s tropical rays. Later, painful heat from my magenta skin will drive the smiling bartender from my room, I’m too miserable to be heartbroken. When he returns with an icy bottle to lay against my chest I’m almost in love.
I remember the strangers who were kind, and the ones who where a threat only upon reflection.
There was a golden-haired, green eyed boy from Argentina with the fierce body guards who hovered. He spoke no English, I spoke no Spanish. But we flirt in broken French. I’m not brave enough to ask how fluent his German is, though I want to. When the body guards come later, stopping me as I crossed the hotel lobby, they demand I attend their boy in his room. He should have asked me himself—the evening might have turned sweeter, or at least softened the edge of my tongue as I denied them. And wonder.
It is the trip of my dreams.
I don’t make poor choices the entire trip. But I fly home itchy, and peeling, and barefoot—my shoes forgotten somewhere during the night spent in the company of the hotel’s electrician’s son.
Travel inspires me. The impressions are there, inside my memories. They’re waiting for the moment when I’ll draw them out and commit them to a scene. They’ll live again, a golden child of war criminals and thugs, or the serial killer luring the young and foolish out of the mid-day sun for a drink.
What inspires you?
-LE Franks
LE Franks is an author of Gay Romance fiction, living in the SF Bay Area surrounded by inspiration; and after years of ignoring the voices in her head, she’s now giving them free reign in the form of her characters.
Email: le.franks.books@gmail.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/LEFranksAuthor