Dreams: Inspiring ideas and sucking up time since forever.

I am always this beautiful when I sleep.

I'm the type of person who dreams often, vividly, and with almost total recall. My dreams are usually so off the wall that friends and family enjoy a play-by-play the next morning. Just last night I dreamt I was back in high school doing one of my college finals (yup!), but my adviser hadn't received my thesis yet and I had five minutes to send it off before I had to take the school bus home! But of course the printer wouldn't work and my computer ate my flash drive! Eventually I said "LOL HILDRED YOU GRADUATED LIKE TWO YEARS AGO" and I woke up immediately. Har.

Most of you know by now that my series CROSS// was inspired by a dream I had a few years ago. I've had lots of dreams inspire my writing, such as the other night when I dreamt I was with some girl I didn't know and was on the run in my own dang house. The part where we perused through a book of signatures inspired a scene I'm in the midst of writing at this moment.

Now, I'm not the type to roll over when I wake up and write what I dreamt about in some notebook. I've always maintained that if the idea was good enough I'd still remember it later on. No, it's the dreams that nag at my brain all day that end up in my stories. I guess at the end of the day my dreams are my ultimate muse.

How about you? Are you a literal dreamer? Do your dreams factor into your writing?

Weekly Writing Check-In: Oh, there's the sunshine!

Yeah. Sunshine.

Woah, look at that! There's the sunlight! After swimming home every day in Japan, and then bringing the most recent typhoon home with me, there's finally some sunshine outside! And when there's sunshine, and me sleeping as late as I want, and blah blah blah that means it's time for...camping?

Drat! About two days ago I suddenly remembered Camp next month. I was a bit put off because I haven't been in the writing mood lately, and I need to finish this chapter for a clean slate in June.

But then last night I had a dream about that novel, and my brain concocted a movie-scene that, when I woke up, I was all about! So this morning I sat and wrote about 1000 words in CROSS//Process and am totally excited about it. Hell yeah.

I won't go much more into it since I'm going to talk about dreams tomorrow for my first Whatever I Feel Like Monday in forever.

How was your week? Any sunshine in your parts?

Let's Talk About Irony

I wonder who's winning.

 Being an anemic, I love irony. When I see irony I am filled with a dramatic, Socratic glee that would make those singing kids on TV cry because their lives aren't as awesome as mine is at that moment in time.  Thus, I like it when irony occurs in my life...so long as it's, you know, awesome irony and not the shitty kind that makes me cry at night because my life isn't as awesome as the singing kids on TV.

What, was it like...a week ago when I was bitchin' about how I was gonna take it easy on writing and blah blah stop dreamin' blah blah blah woe is the Shakespeare cat with a play sword wedged in its fluffy chest blah blah...

That all pretty much still stands, except today I got a random phone call from a reporter for the city newspaper asking if they could do an Art Column piece on me and my Wonderful World of Writing.  Just a blurb of 500 words + pic of me in the local weekly paper.  She found me via that Nano article I was in a couple months ago.

OH WHAT LIKE I WAS GONNA SAY NO?

What an odd time for this to happen.  Sometime in the next couple of weeks the entire county is going to be reading about my authorin' ass, and the timing is quite lovely because it'll be a week or two before the regional writers' conference (which I will be attending).  Huh.  Hmmmm.  Something is afoot.  I do not trust this auspiciousness. CLEARLY THINGS ARE ABOUT TO CRUMBLE.

Regardless, this has prompted me to get some shit together and be productive (gasp) and attempt, MAYBE overhauling my site. (So if anybody knows of a good place to get some nice templates or just WANTS TO DO IT FOR ME~~) I mean, what if people look me up and see that pile of shit.  And even better, I might get readers out of this, because damnit I love you guys but y'all ain't much help here right now, ha.

I should also get to finishing the first draft of Rebirth.  I'm like...two chapters away.  It's ridiculous.

BUT ANYWAY I'LL BE SURE TO TELL EVERYONE HOW IT GOES. If I get around to it. \o/

"I saw it in a dream."

So it’s no secret that I have crazy, wild, and totally inappropriate dreams. These dreams in themselves are amazing story fodder: I know, when I was in fifth grade I wrote a compilation of all the interesting dreams I had up until that time. I even had sex dreams starting back when I was eleven or so. (Such an early bloomer I was.) However, my dreams never quite impacted my writing life so much as they did back in spring 2007 when I went to sleep and dreamed what would become the entire plot outline for the first CROSS// installment. The dream itself wasn’t so engrossing: I dreamed that I was watching it like a movie that my family rented. However, I was entirely unable to get the dream out of my head for a whole day, like it was haunting me, and finally I ended up drawing out a book outline and, after testing out a first scene, put it on the backburner until that following November when I decided to use CROSS// as my first NaNoWriMo experiment. It worked, and now I have a series I am very proud of.

…And now here comes the segue.

I had another dream last night. Particularly about one of my novels, that takes place where I am writing it right now. I really liked what the dream insinuated…basically a very bashful first kiss between two prominent characters. IT was very lovely and I could very well find a way to fit it into the story, but the problem is…would it really be necessary? Without giving too much away, having those characters kiss NOW would be detrimental to their relationship in subsequent plots. This is where I have to make a decision: either use it as is, or get SUPER CREATIVE and find a way to make it work with an insignificant kiss.

Dreams do that to you, though. While one may argue that dreams are a reflection of your subconscious, I would also argue that dreaming is a creative outlet. How many stories would not exist today without dreams? I’ve even had people come up to me and share their dreams with me because they think it would make an interesting story and they don’t want to write it…not that I have yet to do anything like that, but I always find it interesting that other people have dreams too that they absolutely feel need to be told to everyone as a novel. Maybe it’s our mind telling us “Here, you have this amazing idea, but you’re too daft to see it yourself: now get it on it.”

And with that, I’m off to use the remainder of my evening trying to fit and impromptu “first kiss” into my novel. Wish me luck?