Notes inside a would-be writer’s head: I tend to jot snippets down and save them as drafts in multiple e-mail accounts, or wake in the night, and scrawl an idea on a nearby notebook, before falling back into a deep sleep. Sometimes the notes are decipherable next morning, sometimes not.
The sleep thing’s been odd lately, too. I came to awareness last night, while pulling a pair of jeans on. The lamp was on, maybe I never turned it off, but I don’t remember getting out of bed, nor why I was putting pants on around 2a.m. It was weird, almost as weird as coming to consciousness stripping the bed down the other night, manically searching for the squirrel who bit my shoulder in a dream. I was sure he was there, some place, between the sheets or behind the mattress.
Sometimes it’s like the conscious mind lives in a state of ambush, but something gets stronger under the surface. The desire to write, to risk, pushes against the edge of the brain when I’m not making it happen. My sleep gets more violent after awhile. That’s why I keep waking gripped by emotions that dwarf the pale responses of daily life. Each time I close my eyes an adventure grasps me between the teeth with more and more furious energy.
I tried to recreate some recent notes/jots:
Cookbook– The ..emotonal rollercoaster……. ~~ cookbook/emotionally informed food choices. Craig’s nightmare.
Personal Essay– Mystic Burglars; retrench; 7 or 8 here, mine. Write it.
Poetry– Sleepwalking in the Orchard//? Blearghh.. A footnote
Fiction/Literature/_angel, involuntary; fated to repeat; return, failure the success of host. Cat you can’t see, people with a life, lived ordinary, an overlap to some designed dimension. Incurr damage as redemption? Sacrificial but only energie/emotion. –+REsolution or not so much?
Sci Fi/Magic Realism.. Sigh. If you could write a travel plan from hall bathroom to front door, and makeit stretch 40 pages, and the shag in the carpet an interstellar journey, wouldn’t you be worth the breath you waste as a daily occasion?
Children’s, Smart- – – Mystic Burglars again, the launch place. Access that realm. Infused with powers before the eye can see, excommunicated at cusp of adulthood. avoid lord of fly resonance. Not brutality, not animal farm where they become what they avoid, but rather where they can not become what they would inevitably. The Jungle Margin
Till we have faces TITLE?
Smack.
Horde ideas? Community zilch. Time waster versus stealer- like a luck stealer. Someone who preys upon time.
Stop & Wander 
Ohh, those are all ideas, now if you could only figure out a way to do all of them at once, in one text, say 5 or 6 paragraphs, variations on a single theme, that would be cool, oh, you already did that in this one, yayayayayayaya, congratulations,
You should have titled this “How You Know Beyond A Shadow Of A Doubt You’re A Writer”. I’ll bet you that if they’re honest, most everyone who’s ever left a comment here has had similar experiences.
I read a book once titled “Till We Have Faces”, I think. It was a retelling of the Persephone myth, by C.S. Lewis. I’m sure it’s a quote from somewhere else that I’m too dumb to know about.
One of those blurbs reminded me for some reason of a song lyric, by Everything But The Girl.
“There is no real world,
We live side by side,
And sometimes collide…”
For some reason, those lyrics have stuck with me for over 15 years, in my imagination.
Oops. Not Persephone. Cupid and Psyche. I studied that for college one year, probably the same year I studied Persephone….
I am laughing because you sound like me, I don’t sleep well and wake and jot things down…….in the book next to my bed this morning ‘pomegranate’……and that’s not a whole lot to work with :)
Get going, I for one will definitely be buying anything you produce (and thanks again for yesterday).
Isn’t Till We Have Faces a CS Lewis book?
Oh yeah..i should read the comments above first..
And the idea about the sci fi journey from bathroom to bedroom – Terry Prattchet did somethign similar in his books Carpet People and the Truckers series
Paul- see, you always make me feel smarter than I am.
Bob- likely so. I think people’s ‘processes’ are kinda fascinating. They run the gamut, from the ultra organized, to the fantastical, like Tim Sandlin who buys presents for the characters in his head at Christmas, to the utterly off the cuff…
So many different approaches.
J- I just purchased that! I don’t know if I forgot the title, or if I was writing it as a reminder. I can never make heads or tails of my notes in the morning. ltns, btw, good to see you!
jo- lol. pomengranate. Well, it’s a launching place. Maybe it was meant to be a seed… cus pomengranates have so many… seeds.. or…
yeah.
keepfishing- Yup, C.S. Lewis, but I didn’t know the room to room thing had been done as a story.
I guess there really are no new ideas. Welcome, btw.