It's been months since I did any fiction writing, and I wasn't very happy with the writing in the last thing I worked on. (I still think it'll be good in the end, but I wrote a partial first draft in which I gave myself permission for the writing to be bad, and it was.)<\/p>\n
So in a dream I had just now, I was very pleased to finally be writing a story that I thought was good.<\/p>\n
In the dream, I wrote the first section of a story. The words were flowing smoothly, things were going well.<\/p>\n
At one point Kam wandered by and read a little bit over my shoulder. Normally I hate to have anyone look over my shoulder at anything I'm doing on a computer, but in this case it didn't bother me.<\/p>\n
I continued writing. A couple paragraphs later, Jere7my wandered by and read a little bit over my shoulder. (Which also didn't bother me.) He pointed out that the second half of an earlier paragraph was boring and should be cut--\"That should be a command-line option,\" he said.<\/p>\n
I finished up the section I was working on, with a feeling of accomplishment, and looked at the paragraph in question. It went something vaguely like this:<\/p>\n
\n[...] Underneath the opening bracket, he typed \"foo -c bar blah blah [or rather, there was a UNIX command here that made sense in the context of the story]\". He could have typed \"foo_secure -c bar blah blah\" if he had wanted greater security, but [...]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So, yes, the second half of the paragraph was boring and should have been a command-line option, so I cut it. (I possibly should have cut the first half too.) Thanks, j7y!<\/p>\n
Moments later, I woke up, with no memory at all of the story or what it had been about, except as described above. Sigh.<\/p>\n
I'm comforting myself with the thought that I've seen over and over that my dream-self has a lousy idea of what constitutes a good story. It used to happen fairly often that I would have a long convoluted dream, and I would think (either as it was happening or just before waking up) \"Wow, this would make a great story!\" And when I woke up, I would write down what I could remember of it. And later I would come back to it to think about turning it into a story and would discover that it was either total gibberish or, more often, that it just made a terrible story.<\/p>\n
But I don't think I've ever dreamed the process of actually sitting at a keyboard and writing before. And this time when I woke up, it just felt like a waste--I could have spent that time writing something that wasn't going to instantly disappear, y'know?<\/p>\n
I'm trying to remind myself that, given that I was asleep, the chances that I could have used that time for anything productive were slim.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been months since I did any fiction writing, and I wasn’t very happy with the writing in the last…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreams"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}