So, once upon a time, I took a past life regression course. The premise was more along the lines of opening up your mind, relaxing, and learning to block out all the crap that preoccupies you from writing. And since everything around me preoccupies me from writing, I thought this was pretty cool.
Armed with a notebook and pen at my side, I settled down in a chair in a quiet part of the front yard to get started. I closed my eyes, started relaxing…
…and got so scared I’d get eaten by a bear that I went inside.
So, I took the party into my writing nook, aka the bedroom, and shut the door.
Closed my eyes.
Started the relaxation process: mentally and physically tightening and then relaxing every muscle from my head to my feet. Opening my mind.
And twenty minutes later when I woke up, I was refreshed. No regression or chat with my subconscious, but hey. A nap is a nap.
I sleep with a notebook beside my bed, just incase a scene idea wakes me up in the middle of the night or is still fresh in my mind when my alarm goes off. I find this happens less than it used to, namely because since The Rowdy Boys both started sleeping through the night, I’m pretty much dead to the world.
The most recent input from my dream world was, unhelpful as it was, my subconscious reminding me the normal range of motion in a knee is 135 degrees. Thanks subconscious! But not helpful.
I get my best ideas in the bathroom. Seriously. I’ll be sitting in front of my laptop completely stymied by a troublesome section in the novel. Frustrated. Fed up. So I get up to brush my teeth or try and scrub off my entirely too think eyeliner and BOOM. Inspiration hits. Along those same lines, I come up with the best dialogue in the shower.
So there’s a notebook in the bathroom too.
It’s not that the bathroom is like, seven miles from the bedroom or something. But my mind is like a sieve. By the time I walk from one room to the other, I’m like, “What?” I attribute this to being a parent. Once they’re in bed, my brain shuts off. Sure, I tell myself, “Heather, that’s genius. There’s no way you’ll forget that in the next five minutes.”
Hence the notebook in the bathroom.
I like to think I’ve had some awesome ideas from dreams. I mean, I still remember a dream I had in Jr. High that I have written down as a scene for a fantasy novel. But honestly, inspiration is like my craving for oatmeal cream pies: it hits whenever it wants to, unannounced, and sticks around for however long it wants to stay.
That’s pretty much it for me in the good time department today: oatmeal cream pies and writing. The Superbowl was meh and we got like, five inches of snow this afternoon. I hate snow.
But I love writing! And–news flash–I have a rough, generalized idea for my next novel! That I, you know, came up with in the shower. So there will be life after Anything You Ask of Me. . It’s just…really rough and sketchy right now. And vague.
But that, friends, is progress!
