Dreams & Nightmares of the Creative Persuasion

It has been creativity boom town in my brain for the last few weeks. Vivid dreams that inspire new story ideas, random character inspirations throughout the day, puzzling out the beginnings of an idea and ending up with a complete outline in a matter of hours (at 3 AM no less). I have been frantically outlining, jotting down notes on just about every piece of applicable technology or in my new journal at all hours. Sleep is either super amazing or nonexistent because my brain just won't shut off.

Such is the life of a writer. At least my version.

Yesterday I had a lightning moment over a character I needed to write about and the story was then provided courtesy a dream I had over night. The droughts are a bitch in creativity, but the monsoon season is just freaking glorious.

So while I eyeball my coffee supply and check the charge on my laptop, I have to admit that in this rainy, feast season there are pitfalls and nightmares. And I'm not talking about the kind that I'd work into a story.

Hell.no.

One night last week, I went to bed super tired and ready for unconsciousness to claim me. My 2,000 mental browser tabs minimized without complaint. But then the curtains pulled back and the show began.

"Pssst."

No. Not now.

"Pssst. Hey. Just for a minute. Till you drift off..."

That's what you always say and then we're here til dawn.

"Just till you fall asleep. It's happened before..."

Okay, fine. But you'd better not have a trick up your sleeve. 

You know how this ends, right? At some point well after midnight (goodbye any semblance of sleep), I drug my butt out of bed, fired up my outlining software and proceeded to type up as much of the story breakthrough - complete with dialogue - I could.

This, aside from the horrors of sleep deprivation, is not the nightmare.

No, the nightmare came when I went back several days later only to find about half of what I'd typed up gone. Poof. Most likely because of an issue with the auto-sync feature on my desktop. The good news is I still know the basics of what's missing from an outline perspective. The irritating part is realizing that late night brain-dumping session has to be redone.

There are worse nightmares creative-type people can suffer. It's not like I lost 25 pages of pure writing magic that I can never recreate. Or a whole document. Not this time at least. And it's not like I stumbled across something I wrote 10, 15 or 20 years ago and feel compelled to see how it looks now. *shudders*

If you'll excuse me, I have that new story outline to write up, the old outline to revisit and fix, and then my current WIP to get back to.