I live for those moments when a story comes out of nowhere and smacks me right in the head. Usually, it happens when I haven’t been writing for a while and I’m vaguely ruminating about what I want to write, what I might write, who I might write something for but I just can’t decide anything.
It happened to me early Saturday morning. Like 4:30 a.m. early. Because my personal thermostat is broken giving me temperature control issues, I have a tendency to wake up several times in the night these days. Saturday morning, I woke up as usual…but when the thermostat finally kicked in, I kept lying there, wide awake, with a story running through my brain. Not just a story idea, but actual sentences. Descriptions. Phrases. Wry narration. I composed whole paragraphs while lying in bed staring at the backs of my eyelids. Eventually, it occurred to me that this was a very good idea, and that I really ought to get up and go write some of it down before I forgot it, since I was awake anyway and apparently not going back to sleep.
I’ve written 18 of my longhand pages in the day and a half since then (which will type up to somewhere around 24 pages, I think). Not bad for a gimme. It may peter out in the next few days, or turn out to be completely unmarketable, but it’s a start, and it might turn out great! Here’s hoping.