Before I get rolling, I have news. In the Midnight Hour won the Laurel Wreath Award for Best Paranormal! Yea! I read the email when I got up on Thanksgiving morning and it was a heck of a nice way to start the holiday.
I've always had stories in my head. I remember as a six-year-old child playing Barbies with my friends. They'd be done and ready to do something else and I'd still be playing out these elaborate scenarios with my dolls. If my parents brought me somewhere and I was bored, I'd find a corner, sit down, and start weaving stories in my head. I didn't write anything down, though, until 8th grade.
My favorite time of day, though, to run through stories was when I laid in bed. That space between climbing beneath the covers and falling asleep was prime storytelling time.
When I wrote Ravyn's Flight, I had the hero and heroine in my head every waking minute of every day. They were with me in the car, at the Evil Day Job (EDJ), in the shower, and especially before I fell asleep at night. I worked out scene after scene and had all kinds of information passed along that never made it in the book. Fun stuff.
Things have changed in the last six years, though. Now, I can't think about the story I'm writing before I go to sleep at night. Oh, I've tried and what happens is I get my mind all keyed up and can't sleep. This has been going on for the last three or four books.
I miss this time to just enjoy my characters and learn about them and what happens next. I wish I could just immerse myself in their world at bedtime and fall asleep as I daydream. Sleep is too important to me to do this, unfortunately.
But I can't fall asleep without telling myself a story, either. What I've been doing is running through stories I know I'll never write. This removes all the pressure I feel to fine tune the sentences I hear in my head. Yep, that's why I can't sleep--I'm trying to write while I lie in bed. But if I'm not ever going to write down the story, that compulsion is gone.
These night time stories are generally fragmented, too short to be a full-length book. Some are old, familiar characters that I've pulled out to daydream about from time to time for years. One of my recent favorites is Keir, the catman from In Twilight's Shadow, and how he found his mate. And currently I'm running through one that was inspired by a novella I read years and years ago. I also have TV/movie based stories, but they're not on the front burner at the moment.
I'd rather be daydreaming my Work In Progress (WIP). When I think of how much work I got done on my earlier books before I fell asleep, it inspires me to try again. But the outcome has been pretty inevitable--I compulsively try to make each sentence perfect in my head (and remember it) for when I do have my laptop up and my file open. It is not conducive to sleeping. Sigh.
