I’ve been a bad little blogger recently. I have drifted away from regular blogs as I turn my entire focus to working on Burn the Night: Book 6 of the Dark Days series. I’ve fallen behind on email again and I know there are a few other things that are waiting for my attention that I hope to catch up on tomorrow.
I have one business appointment that needs my attention today and then I hope to work on chapters 4 and 5 of the book. Unfortunately, I am working on no sleep at the moment. There are just some nights that are rough and sleep does not come. I have a lot of trouble turning off my mind most nights. It runs wild with plans for the next day, the week, and for books that I’m working on. Last night, I watched every hour tick off the clock until I finally had to get up for work for my day job.
Usually, I can manage to corral my thoughts with a daydream before I go to bed. I shuffle through the card catalog in my mind of story ideas and select one that I would like to play with. Ninety percent of the time, it is not a book that I am working on. If it’s something that I am working on then I end up staying awake to tweak the book mentally instead of relaxing. As a result, I rarely get to daydream about Mira and Danaus before falling asleep.
As I lay down to sleep, I close my eyes and let the scene run through my brain as if I were watching a movie. Sometimes the scene just plays over and over in my head like a broken reel, never changing, until I fall asleep. And sometimes, when my brain refuses to shut off, the scene that I’ve come to know so well makes a sharp, unexpected change. Now I’m wide awake as I look at this change from one angle then another, inspecting the strength of the idea.
For the most part, the daydreams that put me to sleep are just random scenes that have no hope of becoming books. However, occasionally an idea morphs into a book idea. That’s what happened to me last night as I desperately tried to sleep. A very old story idea finally took an unexpected turn on me and now I’m tossing it around in the back of my mind. It still needs a lot of development and tweaking, but the kernel of an interesting story is there. I will keep it simmering in the back of my mind. With any luck, I’ll return to it eventually.
For now, I just need some sleep.
2 comments:
That's so weird! I do the same thing at night too when I'm trying to get to sleep. I'm bombarded with ideas and thoughts about what I'm currently working on or as of late an idea I had back when I was much younger and trying to write a story/novel. Those ideas keep plaguing me every night when I'm desperately trying to get to sleep.
nice post thanks for sharing
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