Quotes and Cookies: Dream

Remember when you were a kid and summer meant more time for daydreaming? Yeah. I miss those days, too.

photo credit: Esther17 via photopin cc

Except do you know what? We're writers, which means that it's OUR JOB to daydream. Terry Brooks says so.

Dreaming opens the doors to creativity. Dreaming allows the imagination to invent something wonderful. Don’t cheat yourself out of a chance to discover how well this can work. Don’t shortcut the process. Make dream time the linchpin of your writing experience.

~Terry Brooks

I'm not going to go count how many books Terry Brooks written, but it's a lot. Twenty-three of them have been NYT bestsellers. And he has over 21 million of his books in print. Dude knows what he's talking about. So I say this means we should pretend like we're kids again and spend our summer daydreaming!

Daydreaming, and eating these. (It'll help the feeling like a kid again thing, I'm sure of it. ;))

photo credit: betsyweber via photopin cc

Cheers!

NYC, here I come!

Ohmygosh, you guys. In just a few days time, I'm going to be here:

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My hubby and I decided that for our anniversary, we're going to go to New York. Times Square, specifically. It's been forever since we've gone on a vacation sans kids! They are old enough that they are easy to take, and I hate going places and just wishing they were there to see everything too, you know? Plus, they're awesome, and I'd miss them. BUT, I am very excited to go on this trip just with my husband! I'm excited for him to meet my agent, and I'm excited for us to both meet my editor and her assistant, my publicist (holy frijoles! by this time next week, I'll have a publicist!), my marketing team, the art director, and possibly even the publisher. Plus, I'll get to tour the Random House building. And we're going to see as many of the sites as two people can possibly see in 5 days' time. I'm so happy/anxious/thrilled/nervous/ecstatic I can't stand it!

Have you ever been to NYC? Are you dying to go there as much as I am? If you've been before, what should I make sure that I don't miss?

Quotes and Cookies: Scary

"If your dreams don't scare you, they aren't big enough."

~ Lowell Lundstrum

Scary thought, isn't it? Dreaming big enough that the dream scares you. It takes a lot of guts to dream big! But the big dreams--- those are the really awesome ones.

So... What about you? Are you scared? If you are, have a cookie. It helps. ;)

Daniel Schwen [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Z is for Zzzz benefits

Anyone else feel the need to take a snooze after finally making it to the end of the A-Z challenge? Whew! Twenty six letters never seemed like quite so many. Well.... except for maybe in third grade when they were teaching cursive handwriting. 

But this post isn't about that. It's about the benefits of ZZZZZZZZZZzzz...

No, I'm not talking about the kind of benefits like the fact that your brain works better when you call it a night early enough to get the sleep you need before that way-too-early alarm (or that early-bird child) sounds. Or the benefit where if you SKIP several hours of sleep, you can get in several hours of prime writing time. :)

Photo Credit Link: Whisperfall at Deviant Art

I'm talking about the benefits of dreams.

How they can influence you. Inspire you. Possibly even make you think that your subconscious is WAY more crazy than your conscious is. I read a post a couple of weeks ago at The Secret Archives of the Alliterati by Alliterati K. Marie Criddle about how dreams affect her writing, and I've gotta admit-- it fascinates me!

I've heard a lot of people say that they go to bed thinking about their next scene, and their brain works on it all night. Sometimes they figure it out just as they're drifting off to sleep, sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night with the solution, and sometimes they just wake up the next morning with everything all worked out.

Is this how it works for you? I've got to admit-- I'm a little envious. I posted once about my theory on super powers, and told what mine is. You see, my super power is that I can fall asleep in under two minutes. Sometimes, it's under 30 seconds. And then I seriously don't move an inch-- not even to roll over or even attempt to be a cover hog-- until the alarm goes off. I actually really love my super power. It's a mighty powerful one. BUT, like every super power, there is a downside. My downside is that I can't turn it off! I can't lay in bed and ponder my story without falling asleep a few seconds into it. Sigh. Yes, there are a million worse things in the world. Like insomnia. (Recently, I took some medicine, and the warning said it could cause insomnia. I said YES!! I'll be able to plot in the middle of the night! Yeah.... It turns out insomnia isn't as great as I thought it'd be. Although I do credit some cold medicine-induced imsomnia for me finding my MC's voice in my WIP a couple of years ago. That girl talked to me for hours. So I guess sometimes it can be cool. But more than one night in a row? Not so much.)

So I guess the point is, when we stop running around like a crazy person and finally relax, our brains can do some pretty amazing things. Do you ever remember your dreams? Do they ever influence your writing? Have you ever magically figured something out during the night? Come on, share! I need to live vicariously here.