I dream vividly.Sometimes I dream the same dream repeatedly, often modifying each new version.
Lately I've been dreaming a story I stopped dreaming about three years ago. It's an old dream with some new twists. I had stopped repeating the dream when I realized I couldn't take it anywhere. I had even started to write down the story line. Now the dream has a basis for new developments thanks to the addition of a simple mechanism, a new character who is seen and heard only by the main character.
The story has more than enough conflict. It could grow up to become another novel.
The story begins with a traffic accident on a Hollywood freeway that fatally injures the main character, Brian, a writer. The new character, sort of a Grim Reaper, pulls out his spirit, allowing another spirit to take over. This spirit specializes in using the last few seconds of a person's life to commit murder for the Powers. He is supposed to kill somebody and then die. This time he, for the first time in forty thousand years, manages to survive.He wakes up in the hospital, having become Brian, his host. Waking up is a new experience for him and has never happened before. He has interviews with the police, his doctors and his Grim Reaper accomplice, during which he establishes that he will write the stories of the nearly a thousand people he has used as a vehicle for murder, having failed three hundred times over all.
Brian's brother comes from the family farm in Canada to take Brian home to recuperate. There he begins to write his new stories, which sell spectacularly well. He had been in Hollywood to negotiate with a film studio about producing his first novel as a film and had been trying to convince the studio to employ him as a screen writer on the project, which they refused to do. Now he decides to refuse to sell them the film rights unless he is allowed to control the screen play, planning, instead, to sell his new stories for movies.
When he is able to walk again, Brian drives to New York to talk with his agent. In New York, a stranger who has been fatally injured tries to kill him in the same manner he had been killing people. The attempt falls far short but warns him that the Powers want him dead. He also receives threats from the studio that wanted to film his first novel, who warn him that unless he assigns them the film rights they will make it impossible for him to get any other studio to ever make films of any of his stories. His publisher wants him to tour the country to promote his books. He himself wants to return to the family farm and continue writing.
Other attempts on his life show him the Powers are less powerful than expected. His Grim Reaper associate tries to convince him he has become as powerful, in his own way, as the Powers and should openly oppose them rather than simply trying to avoid their attempts to kill him. Following another crude attempt on his life, Brian meets and begins to romance Grace, an adventure travel writer.
I have a new writing program, StoryMill, that I'm going to attempt to use for some of my stories. It used to be called Avenir. I'm having problems getting started due to a steep learning curve for so powerful a tool and may have to look to a forum for help.
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