Day: May 29, 2023

I don’t alway remember my dreams, but occasionally I have some crazy whoppers. Last night, as I continue recovering from what William Gibson described as ‘Soul Delay’ I dreamed a weird little dream about, well, everything. It started out normal. I was on a city street in an Asian country that may have been in Japan (but wasn’t primarily Japanese in any real way). My partner and I walked into a store in order to do some light shopping. We weren’t there for more than a minute before the place was robbed by a crew toting AR-15 style assault rifles. This is where it gets strange. We hop behind a counter and the tiles below it give way, causing the people around us to plummet into darkness, but land on a narrow bridge far below ground with nothing but more darkness to either side. There are people on that bridge clawing their way up towards the new arrivals and the new light as if they’ve been seeking that light their entire lives. However, they are on some sort of conveyor on this bridge that keeps them moving forward towards… I don’t know.. We didn’t fall.

So, it keeps getting weirder. The heist is foiled by some kind of shape shifters who kill the gun-toting folks and then try to kill everyone in the store. We escape. We find ourselves on the streets of this country trying to blend in, which we do not, and running from the shapeshifters. All the while I feel like the key to everything is whatever was going on way below ground that we saw–that we were never ever supposed to see.

My mind is a mess of story. I think that I’ve done myself a disservice by not writing–freewriting–every single day to get these stories out and make some sort of sense of the world as I interact with it. That is what dreams are: Windows into our personal confusion. I’m not sure there is a great story in what I posted above, but I can guarantee I could turn it into a decent run of Secret Wars/Skrull Wars. I’m not yet 50, and I have a crap ton of good story left to tell. I ought to be letting myself tell it–even if nobody pays me upfront.

This is a blog about spaces–writing spaces to be specific. I’ve watched my (side of the) office deteriorate into a messy collection of papers and books that should be attended to at some point in the distant future, but always should be attended to at some point in the distant future. Clutter is chaos. For some there is order to their own chaos but for me there is not. I feel like my desk is a constant representation of my mind, which is to say, sloppy and bearing only the slightest hint of organization. As is one’s space is one’s writing and writing life, so I find that it is important to share this tidbit.

Clean your spaces, people. Seriously. The one surefire way to be productive is to be organized. I’ve long talked on having the right tools for the job, well an organized space can be your greatest tool and ally. Know where everything is. Have a clear sense of a schedule and a plan of attack for how long it will take to do what you need to do as a writer. Most major market novelists operate on a 6-12 month schedule, which requires BIC (butt in chair) on a daily basis and a daily schedule that you keep to unerringly.

That’s all for the ranting. I’m about ready to go back to writing ten minute fiction for a while.