I Always Have My Best Ideas in the 30-seconds Before I Fall Asleep

Without fail, my imagination soars in that place between wakefulness and sleep. Sometimes jarring me back from disreality with how good they seem. They can be good. A little hootage of own horn here: they can be great. Some I write them down, others I don't. I remember some in quiet moments days later and know (think) that means I am onto something. 

The ideas for my last book, and the one I'm currently working on, was a combination of many ideas coming together in a wild moment of creation and inspiration and a tiny splash of madness. It all comes together in a single thought, the first line of the book now in fact. It was truly like being struck by lighting, in an entirely non-painful and totally lightning devoid sense of course. That thought contains a convergence of facts and mythology, of my own understandings and philosophies. That new idea, that convergence, lights the idea within me like a beacon and leads me forward, leads me through my current book and to that next one. I only let myself keep notes but never begin the next one until the current one is done, otherwise I will get distracted and end up with the a great first half of six dozen novels but not a resolution in sight.. The only exception of one that is a novella that I have begun and will slowly work on in spurts and spats for years in order to get it just right. I think it could be good and important if done just right.

Back on the bus. 

Two nights ago I had a such a convergence. I didn't realize it at the moment; it actually took a night's sleep to fully materialize. It didn't force me awake with its brilliance. I didn't write this one down as I lay in conscious twilight. The only evidence it existed was my own thoughts. When I awoke an image from the story was the first thing in my head, as though somehow I was still dreaming, looking almost like a stained-glass window in its brilliant color and stark lines.  It was almost a religious experience. If I believed in such things I swear I would start a religion. (Easy now, L. Ron)

Over the course of that day and the next, I saw dozens of moments that would make up the book. Like snapshots or Zach Snyder-esque slow-motion captures of things that I will write to and through eventually. The best and worst and everything in between, some of them will make up the core of what it is that the book comes to be. Some of which will reveal itself as I write, and then later as I edit. I started notes for it in and I will spend many hours daydreaming about it and filling that pad, filling out the peoples and world behind those moments I now see. Finding more and setting up others which I won't be able to conceive of until I stumble unto them like a blind squirrel finding an acorn that it had not only forgotten it had buried, it isn't sure that it buried that acorn itself in the first place.

In the two (and a half) novels I have written so far the things that amazes me the most are the people, places, and ideas that I don't plan on. Those things that worm their way onto the page by simple practice of spaghetti-on-wall-throwage. Just trying to see what sticks, what needs time to cook longer, and what is overdone and not fit to serve. (Like what I'm doing now with all the metaphor practicing. Nauseating isn't it?) 

Well, it's kind of late for a school night. I'll probably head to bed in an hour or two. 

I wonder what I'll dream up. 

JK