This Week

My mind seems to be everywhere scary lately, but I don't seem to know where to start. From story ideas to weird dreams, it feels as if I have been to many places...without leaving my house.

For now, I will start with my dreams, because either way it'll lead to the stories. Now, it's already the fifth day of the week, so I won't be able to relay every single dream I've had this week. However, the more weirder ones made a definite impact on my conscience. For starters, the most reoccurring dream I have had so far follows the script of the video game I have been playing. It is called Persona 3 Portable, an RPG with a interaction system that allows you to get to know other NPC's back stories, and the interaction system is making me go crazy in my dreams.

Apparently, whenever I'm dreaming, my mind follows that interaction system and I have to pick nonsensical options that lead me into scenarios where either I fight monsters or get pelted by things (namely bricks). In all truth, I don't even think the dialogue in those parts of my dreams are coherent...but I still have to choose something that leads to something painful. Also, if this is starting to sound incoherent, then I'm with you on that part. I'm starting to think I shouldn't play that game before I sleep, because the moment I do, the entire night I'm stuck with that interaction system trying to get myself to wake up. Trust me...having your mind follow that system makes you feel very...sad in the morning (and by sad, I mean "hungover").

Now, when my dreams aren't involved with that video game...well, let's just say it's not any better. Take last night's dream for example: I dreamed that I was watching (and then involved in) a movie where a young African American girl was chopped up into pieces by some Americans. Now, this movie seemed to be taking place in the 1960s...so you can guess why she was killed. However, seeing her chopped up body was very disturbing, enough to be burned into my memory so that when I woke up, I'd be still freaked out. ...and I was, in fact, to the point where I couldn't look in my bathroom mirror in fear that the dream was a premonition of some sort from an actual girl that got murdered.

Of course, after five hours of thinking about the dream and cowering under the covers, I thought of something cool about the story. If the dream was, in fact, not a  crazy premonition, then perhaps I could use the basis of that dream as a story for a novel. Because I am writer, it seems logical to do this kind of thing whenever I have a strong plot dream, but there is one problem. I really question whether I have the guts to write a murder mystery based on something that almost made cry and pee my pants this morning. It will probably be a difficult hurdle to jump if I don't figure out how to make it less scary, even more so if I begin to dream about it more in the future.

I guess in the end, my ability to remember dreams can help me as a writer...but then I wonder how sane I'll be if I do write about them? I just hope I can find another source of inspiration to rely on sooner or later.  

  

Why Is English So Easy To Speak, But Harder To Write?

I haven't written a blog in forever, but that's only because I have been taking my summer class since the 20th of June. As of last week, my class ended, so I am free to write again. It was really difficult to keep a blog when you have to read a 100 to 200 page children's novel while thinking deeply about the author's intentions and messages within the text, so basically I was tied up trying to get an A (and I have achieved my goal). Yet from this class, I believe I will learn to never take another children's book lightly, because the literary concepts I've learned can be applied to absolutely everything.

I had to write about 1,000 words each day for each novel we read. It was not an easy task, especially since I am a careful writer and was limited to certain topics that we had to apply to the assignment. Sometimes, I felt as if my brain was going to explode from trying to think of every possible topic to write about in my post and journal (600 and 500 hundred words respectively). Miraculously, I managed to finish almost everything a day early, which became the strategy to my success. However, it did manage to ruin my sleep schedule and my bedtime ended up around 4 AM Sundays through Wednesdays.

Yet I must say, writing almost every day for four weeks was good practice for my writing career. Now if I wasn't so lazy now, I would be continuing this practice right now. Of course, attempting to overachieve (in truth, I only had to write 500 to 750 words each day) completely tuckered my mind out. Therefore...I'm relaxing by sleeping in and playing video games until my brain finally rests up. So here I am, writing this blog.

Even though I am done with the class, though, I think I want to read more children's books. I've realized that our booklist had a lot of books I had never had the privilege to read until now. Hence, I will make it my goal to finish 100 children's books before I head back to the university for the reason that I want to apply my class a little further than expected. Maybe I'll even blog about what I read just for the heck of it.