[if you were wondering from my last post – Darby beat out Helayna. I finished Blizzard Bound!]
One of the most important times for me to “hear” ideas coming from Story is when I’m not fully awake or asleep. It can happen at night, but lately, I’m picking up the frequencies in the morning.
One of the biggest problems with picking up on those frequencies in the past was the Evil Day Job. I had to be up, rolling out of bed, hitting the laptop at a set time. No lying in bed, cozy under the blankets, while my mind drifted in and out of focus. Sometimes on the weekend I could do it, but usually I was too tired. So I slept late. Then it was time to go – not lay in bed. Same at night. I was always up late to get some words in, so by the time I hit the sack, I was out like a light. (Or I would get on TikTok, which is a whole other time sink.)
Goddess help me if I got a work call at 2 AM because then everything was in the toilet for the entire week.
Now that I’m retired from the EDJ, I don’t have to get up immediately. I do have an alarm set for 8 AM, just so I don’t sleep away the entire morning, but I can stay in bed and drift for a while if I’m not already awake. I can let the subconscious mind work its magic.
AS LONG AS I REMEMBER…
That’s the catch now. I’m getting the twilight ideas, but I don’t always retain them. Especially if I’m showering in the morning, taking care of Honey Bun, making coffee, etc. Then there’s all the little morning routine things I do (now that I have time to do them every morning instead of immediately clocking in for the EDJ). Sometimes those little nuggets are gone like a whiff of smoke.
I can usually find them again, but I have to mine for what I already had. It takes time. And what if I had nuggets for a story I’m not actively working on currently? This is especially becoming important as I try to work on multiple stories at the same time. One story might be “hot” in word count, but I get the nugget for the other story. I don’t want to lose it – but I don’t want to lose momentum either.
The new thing I’m trying–starting this morning!–is a kind of morning pages like Julia Cameron recommends. Except modified and simplified. Stream of consciousness type writing usually leads me to still being too “tight.” I want complete sentences and punctuation. I want to continue the paragraph and flesh it out. All too soon, it’s a rough draft, not a quick note, and I’m losing the other quick notes I had.
So this morning, I took the Blizzard Bound/Snow Song journal and made a page of bullet points every other line. I set a timer for a sprint. And I just went through and dropped as many things as I could think of – even if they were repeats of things I know I wrote down before. Just so I don’t lose them. In 10 mins or so, I had almost a full page. The bullets already there made me keep each idea short rather than slipping into draft mode.
Then I did the same thing for Queen Takes Darkness2 in the House Isador journal (which is almost full again).
Side note: I was kicking myself when I tried to pick up Helayna again after finishing Blizzard Bound. It’d been about 2 weeks since I’d written anything in her draft because Blizzard Bound started the roll down hill. When I get that momentum… nothing’s going to stop me. (Who needs to eat or sleep?) I’m certainly not going to switch to another project.
But I had ideas for Helayna that I hadn’t written down. I was working on her legacy. What her powers are–and would be. AND I LOST IT.
By the time I came back this week, the trail was cold. I had to re-read. Scrounge around in my shitty notes (I didn’t write it down). Re-read again. Get a pick-axe and a shovel and start digging to find what I’d foolishly forgotten to document.
Lesson learned.
If there are glimmers in the gloaming…
I need to make time and space to write them down immediately. So I don’t have to get blisters from all the mining later.