The day has been underway for about 45 minutes as I write this, and so many strange things have hit me. Of course, most of that involved laying in bed for about 20 minutes while whatever dreams I’d had the night before drifted away.
For some reason I had a dream of being in a coffee bar working on my computer and a very cute woman came over and started asking me about what I was doing. It was sort of strange because that never happens to me; never does anyone seem to take interest in what I’m doing when I’m out and about.
In fact, when it comes right down to it, in all the times I’ve written in public–and that’s been more often of late–I’ve never had anyone so much as look over my shoulder and ask what I’m doing. And as far as having a cute woman do that–forget about it.
I think that’s why I found it so strange, because I tend to be the person no one ever sees, the one that never draws any attention to themselves. I can go sit somewhere for hours and nothing happens. Ever.
Oh, but I notice people all the time. I think that’s one of the things about writing, you try to notice everything. You take in what’s going on, the people sitting or standing nearby, how things are set up, the lighting, the sounds . . . it’s all part of the immersive experience. You see all around you and you try to relay that experience to your readers. If you have them, that is. (Ha, ha!)
I don’t know why that hit me so hard this morning. I was in bed for many minutes, in that half-awake state I sometime reach, and it lingered over me for some time. I think I recognized the woman; I’ve seen her before, this I know. But you know how dreams are; they mess with your perceptions and turn everything inside out, so even though you know the person, there’s something about them that’s just a little bit off, not quite right. In this case her skin tone was a shade darker. Still, she was the same person, so it was easy to recognize her.
That is the way of my dreams; things happen there that never happen to me in real life. But then, that is why they are my dreams, just as your dreams are the same way.
Maybe my dreams turned out that way because I was writing last night, working on my new story. I wasn’t burning up the keyboard–I only managed a bit over 700 words–but when I combine that with the morning output we’re looking at about 1,300 words for the day. The story is up to 14,250, and the idea that I’d not make this a huge story . . . hey, what do I know? These stories write themselves at times, and I think it was doing that a little last night. I just wanted to talk to me for a while, and for about 90 minutes it did.
The feel of the story is different now. Before it felt like a goodbye of kinds; now it feels like a reaffirmation. Do I know what I’m talking about? Hell, probably not. But I’m letting the story write itself. I’ll get in 500, 600 words a day, maybe a little more, and I’ll probably finish this sucker up in a week or so. When it’s done, it will be done.
And I’ll probably feel a little sad at the end, because it is a sad story. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written one of those.
Probably time to write about kinky sex after that, yeah?
