Thursday's Children: Dream-spiration

It's one of those days when you just need a little extra coffee...also, I like to show off my self stirring mug. It's really handy and cuts down on spoons. Which is a good thing because the number of spoon trees in the world are dwindling.

Anyway, a while back, I rambled about dream inspired story ideas. See it here.

I've had several dream inspired story ideas since that post, and I have dutifully entered them into my ever expanding word document titled, appropriately, "Story Ideas". It's now four pages long and has blurbs on 26 stories (three of them are part of a trilogy idea) and three of them I've written first drafts for. In reality, I probably won't write all of them, but they popped into my head and I wrote them down.

Anyway, Tuesday night was another one of those cool dreams that decided to turn into a plot-bunny. And yes, I had to write it down.

The dream was pretty weird, and at one point I was saving the life of someone who was supposed to be some sort of savior person. As with all dreams, it was convoluted, but here is what popped out with later pondering.

It has a title, but I still need to build the world. Not sure if it is paranormal, fantasy, scifi, dystopian, or a combination of those. It's pretty loud, but I'm still in the middle of Hate Jacket and can't do anything else until I finish that.

Knots
What if your best friend was destined to save the world?
What if you were destined to destroy it?
What if you were in love with your best friend?
Duty
Honor
Betrayal
Love

'Till Next Time

Mister Sandman, Spin Me a Dream

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the dreaming mind can be an interesting place to get story ideas.  It is unfettered by any restriction.  There are no filters.  Luckily for me, I remember most of my dreams.  Sometimes they can be interesting and sometimes I rather not mention what happens...let's just say, I'll plead the Fifth on them and go onto the ones that don't contain incriminating or embarrassing information (I did dream that I was a girl once...that was weird).  Saturday night's dreams were ones that I could say fall under the jurisdiction of "interesting".  If I can disentangle the weirdness from the worthwhile, I might have two separate story possibilities.

The first dream had a lot weird stuff in it that I will have to discard because, quite frankly, it made absolutely no sense.  The interesting (i.e. usable) part involved a kid (teenager?) turning into a dragon in his kitchen.  Needless to say, people were running for their lives and the kitchen was trashed.  He was pretty mad when it happened, so that is probably the trigger.  He also didn't realize that he was going to turn into said dragon, so it was kind of a shock.  If I can get more details ironed out, it might be an interesting story.

I think I was actually writing in the second dream because it was from first person and I was hearing the internal dialogue.  That equals very cool in my book.  It started with the theft of something called "the Crown of Julius Caesar" from an auction/museum.  Not sure what it looked like or even what it really was.  I don't even think there was anything like that in existence.  Anyway, the thief apparently had some special powers or something because he was able to knock out the lights/security system and then escape essentially unseen (super speed?).  It almost seemed like mutant/comic book style abilities.  There was a scene where he was being interrogated by the police, but they didn't have anything on him.  They just suspected him for some reason.  In the dream, he was able to "disappear" from the interrogation room while the police were watching him.  Like the first one, I would need to disentangle it from the weird nonsense before I could even use it.  Definitely a back-burner idea.

Speaking of dreaming, I've started writing a little bit on my dream involving the "Stone of Unity" (mentioned in a previous post).  The scene I'm working on I'm actually considering submitting to a competition.  Lulu.com is having a short story competition.  I'm not expecting to win anything, but I'm still planning on submitting something.  The story cannot be more than 600 words, so we're not talking anything super-long, just enough for a short scene.  I ended up with a Lulu.com account because I had posted a couple poems on the non-defunct Poetry.com website (which is now just a web-archive of its original content).  Anyway, at one point, Lulu.com had ownership of the site and, as a result I ended up with an account on Lulu.com.  This can come in handy if I ever decide to self-publish.

In other news, I just enrolled in a creative writing class at the local junior college.  I think it will be a good experience and I'm expecting it to improve my writing.  So, starting in January, you can expect posts regarding what I am doing in class.  One of the requirements of the class is to keep a journal.  I'm thinking of asking if I can use my blog for that.  We'll see.

Till next time!

Perchance to Dream

I heard somewhere that Stephenie Meyer came up with the idea for the Twilight Series in a dream.  I realize some of you may have just thrown up in your mouth a little, please bear with me.  Sparkly vampires and vanilla plots aside, what I really want to focus on is the concept of dreaming stories.  I would be surprised if more writers don't do this.  That is, take a concept from dreaming and make it into a story.  I know I have a few ideas rattling around in my skull that I originally dreamed.  Of course the flip side of that is, just because you are an aspiring writer and had an awesome dream, doesn't mean it will make sense when put to paper.  In the case of Stephenie Meyer, she probably should have left the sparkly bit out.  Just my opinion, mind you, but that is what people seem to focus on the most.  Of course, she did make gobs of money on the story. Her books were on the best seller list and are probably still in the top 100 sellers on Amazon.com.  Movies were made for all four books and there was even one movie parody.  It also spawned a whole slew of books involving teenage vampire romance books that seem to have cluttered up the science fiction/fantasy section of your local bookstores.  I didn't intend to spend so much time on Ms. Meyer, but oh well.  It happens.  We take a shower, wipe off the smut, go on with our lives and try to forget the horror and shame.

As for dreaming stories, it does happen.  Our subconscious mind is unfettered.  The filters we put into place are gone.  Of course, we lose continuity and any sane perspective, but if we parse out the gobbledygook, sometimes we can find a kernel of a story.  Before I started seriously writing, I had a dream that I thought would make an interesting story.  I haven't done much with it because I realized that at least one of the characters in my dream may have been a little too similar to the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series.  If I want to seriously write this story, I'm going to have to change him.  I could just barrel on and ignore the similarities.  A simpler solution, but I would hate to get on Mr. King's bad side.  I am a big fan of his and would hate to annoy him (that and he's kinda scary).

The story is still in its infancy (see above), but the gist is this.  On one side we have an empire/country that is heavy into mechanical things (maybe a little steampunk in their concept).  Either way, they are all about the machines (possibly dwarven made?  cliche yes, but still).  On the other side, we have another country/race/empire that is all about magic and nature, etc.  Both sides are at war, etc.  At the heart of it all is something called "the Unity Stone" which was made with both magic and machine at is supposed to bring peace to the land.  A knight of the mechanical world and a sorceress of the magical realm have to put the two pieces together.  The dream involved their meeting.  It didn't turn out well for either party.  Bad guys on both sides of the war have altered the stone and it doesn't work the way it was supposed to.  Just the basics on the dream, but that was what it was.  The more it tumbles in my brain, the more it starts to feel like a real story.  We'll see.

Till next time.