Daydreaming

 

I daydream all the time.  I'm not living my own life, but the lives of my characters.  To sleep at night, when I'm going through an insomnia phase (happens to me every couple months or so), I make up stories in my head until I finally fall asleep from exhaustion.  Of course, then I have either excellent dreams ... or really sad ones.

 

And if a book annoys me too much, I simply rewrite it in my head. I change a character's appearance where they just aren't working well for me. I pretend characters DON'T smoke if I want to like the character (sorry, King, I just can't handle the smoking). Little things like that.

 

I can't quit.  Spent the last fifteen years trying to do everything else, but I always come back to my stories.  Nothing else sticks for long. (Still want to study archaeology, but that can wait until I've published a few books, right?)  So, I am resigned to my fate.  I fight with my internal dictionary every night, forcing the words of my stories to translate onto the computer screen, but it isn't easy.  Not even close to easy.  But, as I've heard before, writing is most difficult for writers.  We struggle with it the most.  The irony ...