Know how you wake up in the middle of the night from a really vivid dream and it gives you a great idea and you say to yourself, "Self, remember this shit when you wake up! It's good stuff!" and then you go back to sleep and you wake up and you say to yourself,
"Damn, what was it I was gonna remember?"
Happens to me all the freaking time. I tried the notebook-by-the-bed trick, but between being blind as a bat without my glasses and the whole darkness thing, I can never read what I write the next day (and if you think I'm gonna risk waking the baby by moving around enough to get my glasses and, say, one of my light-up crochet hooks, you're crazy). So usually I make a mental note to remember it, and then promptly forget about it.
Not this time. This time I woke up in the middle of the night with a GREAT story idea, and more to the point of a type I haven't personally seen yet (though I'm sure someone somewhere has done it, it's not been done often enough to have lost its sheen). I have the basic plot in my head, and a fantastic opening line, and I know how it will end and even have a few flashes of, say point F (assuming that we're going from point A to point H or so; it's a short story). I even made a note of it all on the computer a short while ago, so all I need to do now is start writing, and once I'm done with that I can figure out what genre it belongs in. Are all ghost stories horror stories?
So I'm elated. Haven't had a stand-alone story idea in a while, let alone one that popped into my head nearly fully formed.
In other news, anybody know how to suppress the header on the first page only in Open Office Writer? I know it in Word, but I don't have Word on my comp & can't find an equivalent function in OOW.
2 comments:
I use my DROID X to make notes of middle of the night dreams. I put it in the exact same spot on the bedside table and it lights up so I can type. SMILE
No, not all ghost stories are horror! Write something good and don't worry about genre. The publishing industry is falling apart, and in order to survive, one of these days it's going to have to wake up to what readers WANT TO READ! The smart publishers will learn to redefine everything.
I've recently started look for 10-20 year old books by authors whose style I like, written BEFORE they started cranking out contract-ordered garbage. (Remember when James Patterson was good?) Book publishers can still sell anything with certain names on it, but not for long, thanks to competition from e-books! Readers are demanding good books and they can't seem to find many at Barnes and Nobles.
Write what you love! Your chances of getting published are going to get better soon.
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