Thanks for reading, Greg! I can definitely write about this in the future. The basic answer is that I’m always jotting ideas down on sticky notes, in my phone and beyond. Every life experience, encounter and new study is inspiration. Plus, one story usually leads to another. For example, I’ve been working on some Lyme disease reporting for Medium’s Elemental Magazine. During my interviews, I learned that one of the biggest issues for Lyme patients is maintaining a full time job. That lead to my newest story, which just published today, about the struggle of managing work if you have a chronic illness.

I also get a lot of assignments, so I can’t take credit for all of the ideas! Sometimes my editors send them to me :)

In terms of contacting people, I usually send an email and I introduce myself. I ask for 20 minutes of their time by phone and explain the assignment. Because of my credentials, I usually get a fairly high response rate. For Medium’s Health Diaries column, for example, people are usually really excited to participate! I wait to contact them until after my story idea has been approved, though.

Hope that helps. I’ll write a more specific post about this later!