Writing and Dreams

Writing

Saturday, or at least Saturday morning, was going to be a writing time, but I kept going to the shiny.  And I needed to straighten out the house because I had a (very) small gathering for the Spring Equinox.

Sunday was going to be a writing time... and it was a writing flail time (see previous post), with me slowly typing disjointed sentences.

Monday's writing started out on a good foot, and then Life Intervened and I had to deal with other things.

Tuesday morning I managed to get in about 750 words of very rough draft.  I know how the story ends, getting to the interesting part leading to that end is proving difficult.  It was very helpful to do a parallel play session over the Internet because it got me started at 8 AM.  The best moments happened when I was able to turn off my inner editor and simply write; having a "no backspace key" rule is good in this way.   Right now the story is very internal to the protagonist's head and she needs to be more active.  The problem is a character story, and I need to add some external action that appropriately mirrors the protagonist's inner dissatisfaction.

I got a critique back and it's clear I need to examine my more obscure word choices and do some replacing.  In my more cynical moments, I sometimes feel like I should simply replace every fifth word with "awesome."  On the plus side, the villain of the piece felt three-dimensional.


Dreams

Wednesday morning I dreamed I was on a train in England.  I think this started out as a labyrinth dream, with me walking through neighborhoods, or possibly a train depot, but the dream took on a kind of mystery/puzzle turn.  Mark might have been in the dream to begin with, or he might have been on the train that was coming in.  Besides myself, there was an English "Sarah Jane Smith" character, who, in more English Domestic Sit-com moments of the dream, may have been my wife.

We lived in a train station.  Or else we lived in a train car.  The train station was also a kind of shopping mall and amusement park.  The interior was like a British sit-com flat designed by Escher: lots of overstuffed furniture, wood panelling, a compact floor design, and stairs going off at unexpected angles.  It was also a train car or station.

Previously, someone had died (I don't recall the circumstances, but I think it was an accident).  Somehow the trains were going back and forth through time, so when the train was in station A, it was time A, and when it was at station B, it was time B, but it could go back to time A.  (It's also entirely possible I dreamed different versions of the same dream story and they've been smooshed together in dream recall.)  This gave us a kind of limited time reset, and Sarah Jane and I were trying to come up with a intervention that would save whoever died.  We had to do this before a certain train came in.  Unfortunately, I moved a newspaper (or something) and while this saved the person, Sarah Jane and I wound up as ghosts.

We then spent the rest of the dream trying to influence another woman to do something to bring us back to life.  I think we could move small objects, like keys, or flip pages of books, but that was the extent of our ghostly powers.