Inspiration is not always straightforward. Sometimes you get a really great idea, and .... it leads nowhere once you start developing it. At others, the idea simply takes on a life of its own and grows into a great story. There really is no way that I have been able to discover, which produces a winner each time. I'm not sure everyone has that problem, perhaps they do, and perhaps, they simply plough ahead and keep hammering at the idea until it does work.
In recent months I have found myself trying to develop several ideas, but, after a lot of research, and quite a bit of brainstorming, have put them aside. Perhaps the inspiration necessary to find the roadmap for those stories will come eventually, but I have never believed in flogging the proverbial unwilling horse. When the time is right, it will come together. I know some authors have a formula for this, and can generally work just about any background round a basic line of; "man meets girl, man overcomes difficulties, woman plays hard to get, both face complications in work/relationship, eventually man wins woman or vice versa. I haven't managed to find a formula of that sort that works for the kind of stories I want to write.
Inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett's wonderful use of well known legends and fairy stories, I have been looking at ways and means to do something with them. I'm not a big fan of "horror" as a genre, but I do love stories with a twist in the tail, and I love what might be termed "anti-horror". Hence my enjoyment of Pratchett and Gaiman's wonderful "Good Omens" and Pratchett's "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents". It is a long way off yet, but, in between getting the Harry Heron series completed (Harry Heron; Savage Fugitive is nearing publication!), I have been playing around with a story idea that plays with the whole mix of horror characters and some children's fairy tales which aren't quite how the originals ran. Even if my publisher eventually says "no" to it, it will have been fun, and may be fun for my heirs and successors eventually.
As I said at the start, "inspiration" is a tricky thing. Even when writing a blog!