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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Even In My Dreams

Sometimes people ask me why I write action/adventure romance. I usually end up saying something about Speed and The Terminator being my favorite movies, but it goes beyond that I think. Last night I had this dream...

The hero and heroine are strangers who have to work together if they have any hope of getting out of this dangerous situation alive. For reasons that aren't clear in the dream, they're both forced to go to a warehouse and receive a shipment. They don't know what it is, but it's in a large crate.

While they're waiting, a blond woman strikes up a conversation with them. She's waiting for her own reasons and she ends up giving them her shipment as well. After the crate the h/h are waiting for arrives and is offloaded, the bad guys don silver, asbestos suits that will protect them from very high heat and try to incinerate my couple. The woman they were talking to is killed, but the h/h jump in a truck (conveniently loaded with their crate and the dead woman's) and make a mad dash escape.

The bad guys pursue and for the rest of the dream, my hero and heroine have to work together and trust each other to continue to allude the bad guys. When they finally come out victorious, they walk off into the sunrise, ready to start the rest of their lives together.

If there were more details of the mad dash chase and the victory over the bad guys, they're long gone. Maybe driven away by the alarm or maybe they were just never there. Dreams can be funny that way.

But this is part of why I think I love action and adventure in my romance stories--I'm just wired that way. I totally wanted to just lie in bed this morning and immerse myself in this dream. Replay parts of it, work out who the h/h were and maybe see if there was something that could become a story here. There isn't now, not from the dream alone, but if I played with it and went, "what if...?" then maybe it could become a story.

I have a lot of dreams like this--when I remember my dreams. Some of them have been prodded and shaped until I could write something down, although none of the books I've actually written have been dream-induced. Some of them never become more than a bedtime story I tell myself before I fall asleep.

I used to think about my Work In Progress while I laid in bed waiting to fall asleep, but I stopped doing that when it led to me not sleeping. Instead of relaxing me, my mind would rev up and try to work out problems and I'd either have to get up and write the solutions/words down or I wouldn't work them out and get so tense as I continued to try that I'd end up with a couple hours worth of sleep. But I always imagine stories to myself while I'm lying in bed; I have since I was a child and I can't sleep without them. My solution is to tell myself stories that I know I'll never write. There's no stress to unravel plot issues, no need to remember the words so that I can write them down, no driving need to pop out of bed and work. It's perfect.

And now I have a new story. Tonight, I'll toy with the dream and entertain myself with it.