Tag: dreams

About Writing

TBM remake

Autumn

The other night I had an absolutely hilarious dream about The Black Magus, where the two main characters were bad stereotypes.

Lily was recast as a socially awkward red-head, desperately trying to get the Black Magus’s attention through not-so-subtle means. At one point, she had her phone in hand and was fretting about whether or not she should call him, talking to herself, “I didn’t steal his phone number; I borrowed it.”

Ainmire had short black hair, and dressed all in black. He was too caught up in his own self-importance to actually care about anyone else, but for his own amusement he decided to throw that awkward red-head a bone — because, c’mon, she was being ridiculously obvious about wanting him.

Even as I was dreaming it, I kept thinking about how ridiculous it was.

But it would make for a fun spoof.

And yes, I dream about my own novels and characters.#WeirdoWriter

Does anyone else miss calling them pound signs?

Alice and the Warden

AatW – Behind the Scenes

Autumn

I started writing Alice and the Warden back in February, when I was about halfway through my pregnancy with baby #5. Naturally, I was having *a lot* of dreams about pregnancy and babies at the time.

One in particular really stuck with me, about a young woman living alone in a tower, and I found myself thinking about it more and more. The pieces of a story started to come together in my mind, so I decided “what the hey” and went with it. Given the circumstances of my life at the time, I figured that it was going to be a “purely for fun” side project.

Aaaand seven months later, I’m 40,000 words in with a 3-month-old baby.

A little bit of trivia is that in the original dream, Alice had a brother who was friends with Damon. When Alice texted a picture of her baby to her brother, Damon saw it and put the pieces together that he was the father. However, once I started writing, I realized that the brother would function more as a prop than a character, so I cut him out.

Also, in the dream Alice and Damon broke up with a nasty fight after Damon replaced her with another girl. Again, a new girlfriend seemed more like a superfluous prop rather than a character, so I dropped that idea as well. Having her be flat out abandoned worked better with Alice’s neurosis, since she was still too “controlled” to suddenly blow up at Damon at that point in time.

Hackett was Hackett — basically no changes there. He fell in love with Alice the moment he caught her stealing his books with the intention of actually reading them.

There you have it, the origins of Alice and the Warden.