I had a writing anxiety dream last night–I’ve said it before on this blog, my unconscious is subtle like a brick to the head, so you’ll laugh at how blatant it was–but some of the internal logic of it interested me more than the central narrative.<\/p>\n
In the dream, I had a different publisher, and they sent a woman who was going to help me brainstorm and outline books 5 and 6. She was terrible at it, of course, and we ended up arguing over one of the points of contention I have sometimes with first readers, which is that I often like to set out my emotional beats first, and then figure out the logistics around getting to those beats second. There was going to be a safe with some plot-important papers in the book, and the woman was going on and on about different kinds of locks while I was trying to tell her that the character would leave it open, because he trusted another character so much. The trust was an important emotional beat!<\/p>\n
Anyway, what interested me was that my actual mental outlines felt like they were stored in some fairly inaccessible-while-dreaming brain section. In the dream, I struggled and struggled to remember them, which didn’t seem to be the point of the dream narrative, it legitimately felt like I couldn’t get<\/em> to them. I mean, if you asked me now, I’d be able to be like, “Book 5: boom! a couple sentences! Book 6: boom! a couple sentences!” In the end, I thought I had “remembered” them, and I think I even got book 6 mostly right (In that I decided it revolved around [Spoilery Character], not anything more), but book 5 in the dream was something entirely made up. A safe? Important papers? Neither of those things are in it. Dreams are intriguing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a writing anxiety dream last night–I’ve said it before on this blog, my unconscious is subtle like a brick to the head, so you’ll laugh at how blatant it was–but some of the internal logic of it interested me more than the central narrative. In the dream, I had a different publisher, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[51],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thinky-thoughts","tag-dreams"],"yoast_head":"\n
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