What Influence do Dreams have on my Writing?

What influence do dreams have on my writing?  I would say quite a lot.  I built an entire trilogy around the dreams, nightmares, and visions of one of my characters.  Since the Moon was in Pisces at the moment of my birth, dreams and visions play a major part in my writing.  Even the fact that I write fantasy has to do with the Moon, a luminary of mystery, being in dreamy Pisces.  Whenever I’m at a loss for what to do with or to my main character, I have her (my Main Characters are usually female) I have her have a dream, and then I know how at least the next several pages will go.  

If you haven’t gathered this yet on your own, let me inform you that I am a discovery novelist.  I’ve tried to outline, really I have, but that just makes me want to dive into telling the story even more.  I’ll go into this further next week, when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Very often a dream I had the night before supplies the theme for today’s chapter.  I have a dream journal, which I keep sporadically.  I think every writer should have one.  Record the dream,then discuss what various symbols mean to you.  Dream interpretation is a very subjective field.  It isn’t like it is in the Bible, where one person tells the other what his dream means.  Some symbols are indeed universal, but the rest are best left up to the individual to interpret for hirself.  One example I got from Facebook early today was one young lady wrote about babies.  It could mean you’re going to bear a child, but it’s more likely that this child is going to be a child generated by the mind, in other words, a creative project of some sort.   This was emphatically so in the case of the young lady, who was definitely not in a position to get pregnant.  She’s single, not even in a relationship; there is no beau or suitor on the horizon.  In this case, the interpretation is definitely a creative project of some sort.  

I had one of these baby dreams about 20 years ago.  I found this baby in a car,  and nobody came forward to claim hir.  So, what did the baby represent? A creative project nobody wanted to claim?  It turned out to be my vampire novel.  I made it my own after all.  And in this book I had three main POV characters, as the story was told from three different points of view.  Or maybe it was my story about the Hopi guardian of the underground waters.  The nobody claiming the child could be that from 2009 until 2015 I had no publisher for my work, until Patricia Bates came along.  That’s the reason I’ve been so driven to write, and in this time of Quarantine and Covid-19, my dreams have been unusually vivid and memorable.  I suppose you know that the dreams that are the most vivid and memorable to us are those sessions of REM sleep closes to the time when we wake up for the day.  

Stay tuned next week when I discuss the structure of my writing.  Stay healthy and stay safe.

The Divide between Reason/Logic and Emotion & how it Affects my Writing

The divide between reason and emotion, and how it has impacted my creativity, that is, my writing.  I write speculative fiction.  My SciFi tends to be more science fantasy than Science fiction because I’m always trying to skirt around certain laws of space and time that in today’s science are inescapable.  Here is where the divide between reason (scientific facts)  and emotion (my trying to skirt about the laws of astrophysics) comes in.  From being a regular viewer of the Science Channel’s How the Universe Works every Monday evening to collecting a year’s worth of Scientific American, I have garnered a little scientific knowledge, and you know what they say about a little knowledge.  How can I bend those laws without breaking them?  One way I do it is to either set my story thousands of years in the future, or have a civilization so advanced that they’ve found ways around those seemingly unbreakable laws of physics.  There are some ways, for example, of breaking the universal speed law, i.e. the speed of light.  There is a particle that goes faster than the speed of light.  They discovered that in the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland.  Now to harness that and build an engine around it.   

Next there are the mechanics of writing (reason), and expressing my characters' emotions in any given scene.  I use the mechanics of putting one word in front of another, plus what I know about psychology (reason) to express my characters’ feelings.  Sometimes, and especially if I want to spice things up with some drama, I can get them into a real dust up.  What fun!  If you haven’t guessed by now, I am what used to be called a pantster, but which I prefer to be called a discovery writer, that is, I discover the story as I go along writing.  I’ve tried to outline, honestly I have, but it just makes me want to dig in and write the story.  

That’s another way in which the divide between reason (or as Spock would say, “logic”) and emotion has impacted my writing.  The Reason or Logic part of  my mind says “Outline.  Plot everything out.  Know what your character is going to do before s/he does it.”  But the Emotion or passionate part of my mind says “Write it!  Never mind the outline or those other silly sheets of paper!  Tell the story!  Get it all down before you forget it!”  

What I know about brain science is that my emotions are chemical reactions, combined with 1.5 volts of electrical charge, come together to form an idea.  I am left-handed, so the halves of my brain are reversed, so that the logical, language-based, sequential side of my brain is the right side, while the creative holistic part of my brain is the left side, where most people’s logic centers are.    Truly is it said that we southpaws are the only ones in our right minds.  The right side likes to get everything, all my thoughts organized in some logical rational way.  The left side, highly influenced by my emotions, just wants to go for it.

What I’m waiting on now are the edits to Takuhi’s Nightmare and Takuhi’s Daydream so we can get the trilogy released soon.  Be looking for it on your favorite platform.  Whatever news I have on it you will be the next to know.  See you next week!    

Sheltering-in-Place & my Creativity

’m currently working on a book I found when I looked at a flashdrive I hadn’t seen for awhile.  There’s at least a half dozen novels I haven’t done anything with since I won NaNoWriMo with them months ago.  I’m currently working on “And Love Will Steer the Stars.” I’ll resume working on it in May, after Camp Nano is finished until July, when we’ll have another Camp Nano.  March 31st I’ll have to reread what I’ve done on Intergalactic Encounter  so that the new chapters I’ll write next month will mesh with the first few chapters I’ve already written.  

I may write in a disease next month.  Have the politicians utterly stupid. As a writer, I’m usually pretty creative, and I don’t get out much, but I would like to eat at a restaurant once in a while.  I’m of the generation who cooks, not this lazy generation who orders in. Eating out should be reserved for a treat, not your fallback position. Of course, I’m retired, so I have the time to cook.  Even so, I favor dishes that feed an army, so that I only have to actually cook twice or 3 times a week. Cooking is a kind of alchemy, where you apply heat to “ordinary” ingredients, and come up with something magical.  I even apply the alchemical principle to luftwaffles. I take mix, water, oil, and add pumpkin pie spice and vanilla.. But I want enchiladas, which I can’t make.  

Creativity is somewhat of a compulsion for me.  I noticed about a year ago that the elastic on several pairs of my slacks was getting loose, so I set about  crocheting belt loops for them. It’s a simple pattern, really, chain 3 or 4 inches long, and halfdouble crochet around the chain, working a double crochet in each corner to square the corners.It should take no more than a couple rounds, maybe three, to complete.  I like to make at least seven belt loops for each pair of pants, Sew to the pants a few stitches at each end of the belt loop. If you’re lucky enough to have pants with existing belt loops, you can use these to measure how long to make your crocheted ones.  

What I’m hoping for is enough extra energy to do a little coloring.  Maybe if Facebook gets boring enough, I can swap out my Facebook time for some coloring time.  But the time I spend on Facebook isn’t ALL looking at memes. Outside of funny cats, and stupid human tricks, most of it is chatting with my friebds and acquaintances.   The evening of the 31st of March I’ll be handwriting what I’ll be dictating to my Dragon the next morning. I hope I write a lot.

Well, that is all for now.  If you are in Patricia’s stable of authors, you might write a blog about how you are coping with the shelter-in-place, and how it is affecting your creativity.