I’ll tell you where: in the shower.
If the world ever gets to the point where we can no longer take showers, due to water shortages or zombie apocalypse or whatever, that’s the end of my career. For serious.
I don’t know what it is, but in the shower my brain just opens up and all the ideas fall out (this is why it would be a bad idea for me to take one during the zombie apocalypse, see. The rest of the time my brain is protected by my very thick skull).
Various friends have suggested a diving slate for writing the ideas on, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t help. It’s not like I get out of the shower and forget all the ideas. I think if I could physically write IN the shower – with a waterproof laptop, say – then the shower would no longer be magical. It would be just like sitting in front of the computer, doing the work, except wet. I think I have to be completely unable to work in order for my brain to cut loose like that, that it’s my brain’s own special way of thumbing its nose at me.
And hey, you want to thumb your nose at me, Brain, be my guest. Whatever keeps you jolly.
Meanwhile, here’s a paean to my shower, from the Pirates of Penzance. It starts at about 1:40. (And yes, that is Kevin Kline, all dashingly mustachio’d.)
You may be having trouble understanding what they’re saying. Here are the lyrics:
Hail, Shower-head! O gurg’ling muse
Thou giv’st writers the power to chuse!
Hail, flowing font of good ideas!
All hail, all hail! Now let’s go eat some cheese!
WHAT. Stop looking at me like that. Sometimes even W. S. Gilbert had a tough time finding a rhyme.
Rachel Hartman 
She’s telling a terrible story, but it doesn’t diminish her glory
we’d been mistaken to’ve thought her
not up to a paean to water
had she not in elegant diction, taken a break from her fiction
which is not in the same category as a regular terrible story.
LIKE!
Wow. We must have left that particular bit out when I was in Pirates in college, because I have *no* memory of it! Especially not the shower lyrics, I would definitely have remembered those. My G&S geek cred ego is taking a hit, here….
LOL. I love this bit of song because it’s like this musical non sequitur. They’re singing along merrily, conversationally, and then BAM! Everybody’s earnestly singing this serious hymn to poetry. Er. Showers. Whatever. I love it.
Isn’t that Linda Ronstadt in the background?
Yep! I was looking for this version in particular because I have the album, and she hits a super high note, but you can’t really make it out here.