This morning, as I struggled to wake up and emerge from the warm cocoon of my bed into the cold cave that is my house, my brain started composing a letter. The letter was one asking for advice, as from an advice columnist, about the difficulty in waking up, and the near-constant desire for sleep, and if that was a problem, and also what if I really just like dreaming. In fact, I like it so much that most of the time, I’d rather be dreaming than anything else in the whole wide world. And I realized that was, if not an actual, full-blown problem, it is at least an indicator of a problem or a precursor to a problem. Or maybe it’s just seasonal depression.
Anyway, I thought further: maybe I should explore that as a character for my NaNoWriMo novel this year? A main character who just wants to sleep a lot, is avoiding something, and (because a novel that was just a series of dreams interspersed with scenes where the character was just going through the motions until he can sleep again would be, y’know, boring) is forced to stay awake for some reason.
I think the character would be interesting, and funny, and probably grouchy. Kinda like Dr. House, from the teevee.
Then I thought: “But I already have an idea for my NaNoWriMo novel – tell a story backwards!” (even though I haven’t blogged about it yet, yes, I’ve been working on this idea for this year) And I thought further: “I don’t really know how to combine those two ideas – I have no idea where my sleepy-but-not-narcoleptic character would end up.”
And yet, I’m going to intersect those two ideas. Even though I have NO IDEA how it’s going to actually “start” (and by “start”, I mean “end”, because I’m beginning at the end and ending at the beginning).
So that’s what I was thinking this morning.