Still Sleepless in Brighton
Being a writer introduces you to many new experiences. I’m having one right now. Excellent Agent (hereinafter EA) wants revisions to novel #1. Good revisions too. Novel #2 has gone off for a bursary read to a literary consultancy. Novel #3 is around 35,000 words. Normally (if anything is normal in my life) I work on several things at once, but one thing is always primary and until last week this, quite naturally, was novel #3.
Now, of course, novel #1 is also primary. Whichever piece of work is primary, that’s the one I usually find inhabits my subconscious and that I get nocturnal messages about and inspirations for.
Last night I had a dream. I was dreaming as one of my characters (this seems to be unusual – people generally dream OF their characters, not AS them) but it was the protagonist of novel #1, in the setting of novel #3. A part of me was trying to argue with the dream, saying that it was wrong, but most of me wasn’t listening. It was all really rather nasty. So I woke up, as one does, slightly panicked and disorientated, put the light on, assured myself I was me, in my bed, in my more-or-less reality and went back to sleep again.
I woke up two hours later, having been told by my subconscious that there was a minor flaw in novel #1 that neither EA nor I had spotted. I wrote down the correction (Alan is part-time shepherd for Tim in February/March – isn’t that gnostic?) and went back to sleep.
And then the alarm went off …
Shepherd courtesy of Nicksarebi at Flickr
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