Day 302: Looking for Inspiration

I've been feeling something is really stale about my book since I started editing. A lot of what I wanted to focus on has been lost either to fading memory or because I got distracted along the way while writing it. That's ok, I guess it happens to everyone. But I'd really like to recapture that spark that got me working on it in the first place. I've been trudging through it like it's a bother to even work on and I don't want it to be that way. I'm sure it'll suffer for it.

A lot of what inspired me in the first place was the mysterious side of dreams that I wanted to capture through the magic of Oneiromancer. It's a book about dream magic after all. I've read a lot of writers who have some of their best ideas come from dreams. There's even a whole book about it I found on amazon that I might like to read one day when my list clears up a little. Stephen King talks about his dream journal in 'On Writing,' and some of my favorite authors such as Toni Morrison and Ramez Naam include many scenes clearly inspired by a dream-like state. These scenes tend to be ethereal, fleeting, and often a little confusing, just as dreams usually are. I find the ways in which dreams burrow their way into artists' work fascinating. Dreams themselves are also very intriguing to me. They're a great source of mystery in the modern world, where so much of the mystery in other things has been solved already. Anything that offers a sense of wonder is worth exploring in my book. There's a lot we don't know about dreams and there's a little bit of magic hiding in everything we don't really know about. Maybe I can find some if I go looking.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley