Search This Blog

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

It was a dark and stormy night...

Have you ever suddenly woken up from a bad dream? Probably.

Have you ever combined something going on in real life into your dream? Like, say a thunderstorm or an alarm clock or a ringing phone? Sure, who hasn't?

Have you ever laughed yourself awake? Erm...maybe?

Ok, well have you ever woken yourself up purely from an idea?

I had that experience the other night. Yes there was a thunderstorm and yes 90% of the dream made less sense than 50% of Inception. But the core idea of the story was just way too cool to pass up! At least I thought it was...

Then I realized the coffin nail (so to speak) of this particular idea: vampires.

"It's alright," I thought to myself, "no one's done vampires in a while, right?"

So the idea got noted in a far flung corner of a random notebook in the apartment. It'll probably rot there until the next round of blood-sucker mania sweeps the nation. It's not to say that the idea wouldn't be good enough or that I couldn't write the story well enough to get sold.

But at this point, I feel like it's just another strike against me before I even start. And that's not meant to sound self-defeating, but rather it's a fact. A project started today probably won't be ready for submission for another year. Factor in maybe another year until that (hopefully) gets picked up, then at least a year after that before it hits the shelves. Are people still going to be craving vampires in 3 years? Some will, probably not going to be as big as it is now.

So the vampire-idea (which, incidentally combines "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"...sorta) will remain in the notebook for a later time. Now I just have to wait for a vivid dream about steam-powered robots and time-jumping samurai!

~VK

1 comment:

Jamie Manning said...

I know exactly how you feel...except I took that vampire idea and went with it. To the tune of 70k words! Now it sits lonely in my desktop, just waiting for agents to not become nauseous over the word "vampire"!