The one that got away

That’s what you usually say about ex-girlfriends, who you believe may have been your true love after all.

Well, that’s not what I mean in this case. I mean those ideas that you randomly get in the middle of the night, in the shower, during your morning commute squeezed in between a million other people. Basically, anytime that you don’t have a pen handy to jot it down.

It keeps happening, too. I have a notebook and pen with me wherever I go, even if it’s the tiniest pen and the tiniest notebook you could possibly find. I’ve used my phone in the past to take a note just so I won’t forget.

But there’s always one that slips away and the worst bit is that it leaves you with the knowledge of this random encounter in the dark and nothing more. You knew you had an idea, but you’ll be damned to figure out what it was.

Sometimes they come back and off I run to write them down right away. But sometimes they’re gone for good.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be yours, but you can’t help but wonder, if that might have been the one. Your one true love, the novel that would finally have been the one to be written, completed and published.

That though is futile, of course.

The sense of loss will stick for a little while and then you move on and dream up another one.

For the next month I am going to have to be especially adamant. Nothing is allowed to slip away. If I wake from a dream that provided me with an idea, I will write it down on my phone, squinting bleary eyed in the darkness onto a screen that will be too bright for the hour of the morning.

I’ll have a notepad right outside the shower, just in case. And I’ll avoid travelling with a million other people on the tube; just so I have room to take a note should need arise.

It is quite curious, but this whole NaNoWriMo seems to give everything an extra edge. Something I have thus far unable to find just by myself. Even if I don’t talk to anybody in the NaNoWriMo community during that entire month, I still feel as if I’m getting something out of it.

I’m a little nervous, I feel unprepared.

I am not, though. I also feel ready and completely motivated.

I wish I could take the entire month off and not have to go to work.

Maybe next time.

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