any excuse for a nap

[adelaidesean]

Recently on Facebook I mentioned that I'd finished a novel, the first of three I've planned for this year. It's a four-part romp about a young boy who lives in a street where nothing works. After a mysterious crew of silver-suited plumbers wake him up in the middle of the night, Ollie finds himself falling through holes between worlds--meeting vampires, cyborg pirates, and living castles, among other things--and ultimately saving the multiverse from the plumbers' nefarious plans.

The release date of the first instalment is May 2010--a very long way off . It doesn't even have a title yet (but Omnibus is the publisher). I mention it here mainly to answer those people who've asked about it, and also to talk about how so many of my stories are inspired by things that happen at night.

This particular book wouldn't have existed but for a 4am event in our street almost identical to the one in the book (minus the holes-to-other-worlds angle, of course) plus several hours of hypnagogic musings on the subject. That's just one book. There's also The Stone Mage & the Sea and the various Change series, "A Map of the Mines of Barnath" and the Structure stories, my first novel Metal Fatigue, and Protection, the crime novel I'll be writing next year--all of which came from dreams. That's not to mention the many, many plot points generated while unconscious--solutions that came to me, over the course of waking up, to problems that utterly stumped me the day before.

The subconscious-as-homunculus model of writing is one I'm very much beholden to. The more evidence mounts, the more I'm convinced that my best ideas come while I'm asleep.

That said, I've stopped reaching for my bedside notebook every time I lurch out of unconsciousness, brain a-buzz with what feels like awesome inspiration. Most of the notes I write under those circumstances are gibberish, when they're legible at all. Sleep, I've learned, may provide ideas, but it's also a great filter of crap ones. I figure that if something's worth remembering, I will remember it--or it'll drag me out of bed, properly awake, after an hour of nagging--and if I forget something, it was probably for a reason. On the odd occasion I do worry that I've lost a good idea, I console myself with the knowledge that coming by another one might be as simple as rolling over and getting a few more Zs.

Comments

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Do you ever have vampires - ideas that work brilliantly in the night, but can't stand the light of day?

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Sure do. My "ideas" file is full of them. Sometimes they lurk there for years, waiting for something else to latch onto. Sometimes two vampires combine to make a whole new critter, one that lurches out into the light, blinking and mewling, before being snatched up me, their lord, and utterly exploited.

Here's one, verbatim: "a Russian serial killer has moved to Australia and re-started life as a journalist. The only evidence of his crimes back home are a series of tea-towels taken from the victims' homes plus his habit of encoding the names of his victims into the articles he writes. Similar crimes start occurring in Australia, and then someone stumbles across the tea-towels..."

Tea-towels? What?? But maybe one day I'll ditch that element and find something useful to do with rest of it. Or vice versa. :-)

[accy.livejournal.com]

So when was the last time you watched Time Bandits?

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Tea towels of death! I like it!

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, it wasn't until recently that I started keeping handy a little notebook or something to scribble down thoughts that come to me in that liminal zone between sleep and waking. I've written some of the best prose in hypnogogic states, but forgot everything by the time I got to a pen and pencil or the next morning! So now, whenever something comes to me in a flash of waking/dreaming, I jot it down as quickly as possible.

The following sentences came to me in the lee of a dream just last night:

"Pittsburgh's never been a town for heroes—or villains, for that matter. I've always wondered why that is, you know?—why the whole masked vigilante/criminal thing never took root in this city like it did in, say, New York (where in the 1930s and '40s there were six or seven of them in every neighborhood) or Chicago or DC. Even Philadelphia had one, back in the old days: Liberty Belle, the All-American Maid who cleaned up "Philthy Philly" mainly by using her sex appeal to get the town's young rowdies all riled up against mobsters and troublemaking Negroes. Pittsburgh, though...."

Too much goddamned Watchmen. Now I'm writing about costumed crusaders and razor-wielding serial killers in Pittsburgh. It's all going to lead to some big transhumanist thing about the first bio/nano-engineered superhero.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

There are no new ideas. :-)

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I think we have a title. :-)

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Posthumans need postheros too!

[accy.livejournal.com]

That is very very true. I look forward too it.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

I should make it clearer (to anyone less understanding than you who happens to read this) that my story is completely different to Time Bandits. But it's good to know that in synopsis it is flagging that movie. I'll be sure to phrase it differently in future. Thanks!

[accy.livejournal.com]

I wasn't suggesting at all, certainly not seriously, that it your novel was in any way derivative of that movie. Just that they synopsis reminded me of the movie. Well the beginning at least.

[tallaudrey.livejournal.com]

Dear Sir, may I pls borrow your homunculus? Mine seems to have run away to join the circus.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Please feel free. I think I've got a whole family of them in there sometimes.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

No worries at all. The end has hints of FLCL, so if you've seen that you'll recognise that as well. :-)

[tallaudrey.livejournal.com]

Xlnt, homunculus fostering ...

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

I think so, too! I've never been a big comics freak--and have always thought that superdorks like Superman and the endless parade of "mutants" like The X-Men are beyond tedious (as well as thoroughly unrealistic). However, what's really there to stop a well-trained, technologically-adept character like, say, Bruce Wayne from becoming a disguised vigilante? And furthermore, now that the age of the Acceleration is upon us, very soon there will be "people" running around with clearly superhuman abilities: maybe not the power to shoot lasers from their eyes and/or turn invisible and/or fling buses into orbit, but such things as massively-amplified intelligence, physical prowess, endurance, and speed are well within the capabilities of contemporary science, let alone science in five to ten years.

What happens to all those costumed vigilantes when the real superheroes appear? And, worse, the supervillains? I mean, I fully plan to wreak unimaginable havoc upon the world the microsecond my uploaded consciousness gets loose onto the 'Net, after all....

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

You could try creating your own. From what I gather from reading Paracelsus and Agrippa, you only need some fresh horse manure, a flank steak, and some semen.

Messy, yes. Definitely yucky. But, hey, it works! I have five of 'em. Who needs a Roomba or a Muse when you've got an army of doodoo golems at your command?

Don't expect to get many visitors after you create them, though....

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to note how we apportion sinister techno-powers to the villains in the world that already exists. Hitler's various secret superweapons (UFOs being just one of them); the Russians and their psychic researches and red mercury; Bin Laden and his supposed "nuclear, chemical and biological weapons" (to quote Rumsefeld in '02); not to mention all the nefarious hackers and phishers and whatnot, all lining up to steal our FreedomTM. With robots already active in the theatre of war, and likely to be used by the "wrong" side any day now, how long until we're living in some weird cross between Batman and Terminator, with Robocop caught in the middle?

I for one am excited by this prospect.

I mean, I fully plan to wreak unimaginable havoc upon the world

Heh. Join the club. :-) What will you call yourself?

[tallaudrey.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure I have a flank steak around here somewhere ... can they make coffee? This is the important question ...

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

I fully expect to see "rogue" autonomous battle-bots in the Middle East any time in the next ten to fifteen years, max. And in the meantime, the development of military-grade strength-amplifying exoskeletons will make Batman a literal reality in much less than a decade. After all, to create a Batman-like figure you only need a well-trained individual, i.e. a martial arts master or, more appropriately, a former Navy Seal or Ranger, plus an armored exoskeleton and a Purpose. At least here in the States, the current "War on Terror" is rapidly producing a generation of people with extreme psychological damage, damage that makes Bruce Wayne's loss of Mommy and Daddy pale in comparison, who also have a strong sense of justice imparted by this country's ridiculous, ultra-polarized ethical situation. It's only a matter of time before some lone ex-soldier turns into a cross between the Punisher and Iron Man.

And when the havoc comes, my identity will simply be "Plague of Locusts"--since my primary consciousness will be distributed among trillions of semi-independent nanobots. I plan on sweeping through this continent like a storm, leaving behind only piles of oxidized-iron sand and re-processed graphite in my wake.

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

According to alchemical lore, they're fully capable of performing most simple laboratory duties. If they can titrate aqua fortis, they sure as hell can run a Mr. Coffee. :) But you might want to make a little full-body isolation suit for them from a pair of latex gloves, though. Don't really want that getting too close to anything meant for human consumption!