I refer to what you call dream time as "headwork." That's the part when I visualize and choreograph scenes in my head, try on different lines of dialogue for size, and basically live in the world I'm inventing in my head while my body is doing something that doesn't really need my attention. A friend of mine picked up the term from me, so we'll talk to each other about how "I did some headwork on a new story" and so on.
Between headwork and keyboard, there's an intermediate phase for me which is free writing about the story I'm working on, taking the headwork and putting it in a fixed form, not as exact scenes, but as descriptions of scenes, gists of dialogue (she says this, he says that), and so on. When the free writing starts to turn into actual scenes and dialogue, it's time to take it to the keyboard.
I'm in a kind of mushy state in my current project, which makes it hard to set goals. I just pulled down the novel I released in December on the basis that it only sold two copies and it still needs work. (I was so determined to get it out by the end of 2025 that I sent it out a little undercooked.) So now I'm back to what I was doing, which is effectively working on an entire trilogy at once, with each new tweak leaving wrinkles that have to be smoothed out in other volumes. I'm very much in the fuck around phase, and we'll see what I find out.
I refer to what you call dream time as "headwork." That's the part when I visualize and choreograph scenes in my head, try on different lines of dialogue for size, and basically live in the world I'm inventing in my head while my body is doing something that doesn't really need my attention. A friend of mine picked up the term from me, so we'll talk to each other about how "I did some headwork on a new story" and so on.
Between headwork and keyboard, there's an intermediate phase for me which is free writing about the story I'm working on, taking the headwork and putting it in a fixed form, not as exact scenes, but as descriptions of scenes, gists of dialogue (she says this, he says that), and so on. When the free writing starts to turn into actual scenes and dialogue, it's time to take it to the keyboard.
I'm in a kind of mushy state in my current project, which makes it hard to set goals. I just pulled down the novel I released in December on the basis that it only sold two copies and it still needs work. (I was so determined to get it out by the end of 2025 that I sent it out a little undercooked.) So now I'm back to what I was doing, which is effectively working on an entire trilogy at once, with each new tweak leaving wrinkles that have to be smoothed out in other volumes. I'm very much in the fuck around phase, and we'll see what I find out.