Living the Fictional Dream

I have been having the craziest dreams the past few months. I wrote about a month ago about a vivid dream I had that was a scene from a novel — it happened again last weekend.

The new dream was somewhat of a mish-mash of plot elements from two different movies — Go! and The Prestige, if you can imagine that combination. But the weird thing was that the combination worked. And with enough fleshing out, those plot elements would combine into something really different.

It would be a Y/A novel — probably either sci-fi or more of an adventure story, depending on the angle I took on a certain element. There would be some mystery thrown in, also.

I’m not sure which one of these novel dreams excited me more. Maybe the first (the mythological creatures/fantasy world one), but only slightly.

I wonder if this is how Stephanie Meyer felt when she dreamed the dream that became Twilight?

I tell you, it would be so nice not to work full-time. I’ve got all these novel ideas buzzing around in my brain, and little to no time to actually work on something. It’s a lot easier to work on short fiction when you work full-time — or, at least it is for me. Getting into that novel mindset requires more time and energy that I can come by easily when 40 hours of the week or more are devoted to technical writing.

Of course, the catch-22 is that to justify quitting your job to write full time, you really need to have a novel deal in the works.