750words.com And Other Bits

Thanks to a friend of mine on another blogging site, I have discovered this nifty little website called www.750words.com. It is based on the idea from The Artist's Way about writing three pages in a journal every morning. These "morning pages" are supposed to be sort of a brain dump of sorts, just you writing, unstructured, letting words flow out of your mind, through your fingers, and onto the paper... or in my usual case, into becoming on the laptop screen.

One of the things I love about the site, and don't go laughing here, is that they give you little badges for different achievements. Ohhh, don't go offering badges to someone who runs around World of Warcraft reading obscure books and eating odd things just to gain an achievement for the hell of it. You know I'll just be all over that site! So far, I have earned a turkey (writing 3 days in a row), a penguin (7 days in a row), a flamingo (10 days in a row), and a cheetah (speedy typist!).

What can I do with all these badges, you might ask? Well, nothing really. But a giggle or two over them, and a grin when I see a new one pop up is more than worth it to me.

NaNoWriMo is coming up in fifteen days. Do you have your plot bunnies well fed? Mine have decided to whisper in my ear as I sleep and give me dreams of the very vivid sort. This latest dream had me hanging out, talking with a couple guys who were working on a private plane. We were in the country somewhere; huge, leafy trees offering shade, and what looked like a boathouse-cum-shack with peeling white paint was very near. The sound of a couple small jets overhead cut though the nature noise, and we looked up, for some reason instinctively moving closer to the shelter of the plane to help hide our presence, although there was nothing we had done wrong. One of the guys made the comment that they were marking the perimeter, or doing something with the perimeter. This seemed to be enough of a reason for me to run up to the larger house for supplies. I don't know why we were going to run, and I don't know why the military (because that was who the jets seemed to be) were flying and dropping some sort of sonar markers along the lake shore, but it was apparently enough of a reason for the character I was to be alarmed.

In the larger house, a Native American man in his thirties was working, renovating a sunlit room. I greeted him, and tried to act as nonchalant as possible as I pocketed Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and scoured the little medicine cabinet for whatever else I could sneak away with. He came in, though, alerted by the sounds of my scrounging, and asked me what in the world I was doing. Not in a threatening way at all, but for some reason the two guys at the plane and I were supposed to be a group unto ourselves. I turned, plastering a smile on my face that I was hoping looked a bit more genuine than it felt, and tried to play my antics off as just that - the nutty chick's silliness that everyone around was supposed to be used to.

I remember the sunlight streaming in through the glassless window in the other room, the room where he was working, and lighting the area behind him as he stood over me, and the motes of sawdust and tree fluff dancing erratically in the shafts of yellow gold. And I remember having the feeling of knowing him, and of his knowing me a lot better than either he or I would publicly admit.

And now, after writing all of this down, I have a funny feeling the basis of my NaNo novel has just been changed by the characters who inhabit that world. That's just fine with me... I have learned through the years not to fight them. They will take you where they want to be, and if you fight, you wind up with a story that doesn't come off nearly as well as you had hoped, or (and this is the more common result) you will find yourself with a half dozen or so partially written stories that have no life and no luster to them, and will never see the words "The End" to complete them.

Dreams

I don't dream that often, or at least I don't remember them most of the time. When I do, they are likely to be a bit bizarre, and usually in full color... one of those "real" dreams, that leave you in an awake state wondering if it really happened.

The other morning I found myself still a bit sleepy, so I went back to bed for a little nap. One of those bizarre dreams began playing itself out in my mind, full-color, scents and touch and even the feel of the night time breeze. There was a character in the dream that, while he was only there for a few minutes, he stayed with me after I woke, even as the rest of the dream faded into memory.

By yesterday morning, I wanted to write a story, bringing him into it. I don't have a clue where the story will go, or what the reason is for him to be there, but it seemed urgent that I at least begin this. So I did.

Over the years, I have written quite a few short stories that came to me first in a dream. It seems to work well for me, and for that I am grateful. When I write, they seem to develop of their own accord, much like a dream does. I have to admit, I love being along for the ride in these things... It's like sitting back and watching a performance from my Theater of the Mind, to borrow a term a friend uses for hers. I am like my characters - I don't know what will happen next, and this means I can suggest choices for them from the same viewpoint they have. Sometimes they disagree, and if I have to fight to get them to do what I want, I know I am heading in the wrong direction. Just let them do their own thing, and the story unfolds in vivid reality, with me as the historian of events.

Of course, then I have all these other distractions, like blogging about writing when I really should be writing the story...

But procrastination is one of the things a writer excels at, right?

Nightmares

Cross-posted in my LJ as well.


My sleep last night was full of nightmares and badly-weird dreams. In one, there was a government nuclear test, and they were going to set off three small test bombs near here. I don't know if it was in the ocean or in the desert, but it wasn't an underground thing. I could hear the announcing voice in the night, telling everyone to remain calm and head to the central part of your house. Use the special blankets and cover yourself in the bathtub. Do not attempt to open your eyes for ten minutes after the final explosion. (This seems to have come from my memories of Gary England's tornado warning announcements from childhood.) I grabbed my old blue blanket and pillows, and lay down in the tub, covering myself completely with the blanket. As the countdown began, Alanis jumped in the tub with me and I put the blanket over her, too telling her to keep her eyes closed. We curled up together and the first bomb went off. I could see the flash of light behind my eyelids. "There's one," I thought. Alanis had tensed and started to move, but I held her tightly and she stayed, still tense. The second one went off, and I was sort of wondering why they were doing this above ground.... it was as though no one (including myself) had thought about the consequences. I don't remember the third one going off, and know in my dream I was waiting, wondering if I had miscounted or what.

I woke suddenly, terrified because I knew at the moment of waking that those things were completely wrong. I tied calming myself, telling myself it was a bad dream and that was it. Nuclear, nuclear, what the hell made me dream that? I wondered. I hadn't been watching The Day After.... oh, but one of the scene segments in the first episode of Remington Steele I watched last night was called "Nuclear Love". Maybe that's where it came from.

I was gripped with more panic then, suddenly my brain counting months until my UI runs out. Okay, I only just got my third check, so there is no reason to go into panic mode, but I did. I calmed myself again, promising panicked insides that I will use up major bandwidth today in sending out my resume all over the place.

There was one, perhaps two, other dreams after that one, but now I don't remember them... just that they were unnerving as well. I was glad to get up this morning.