Overactive Imagination

I confess that after the month of April, in which I posted every day, I feel like my blog is seriously lacking ....

But that's to be expected as most people simply don't post on their blogs every day :)
Yet I am trying to make an effort to post every week at least.

As a writer I find that an overactive imagination can be a blessing, and a curse.
I love that it runs wild while I'm in story mode - you know, when I'm in front of the computer and the ideas are coming faster than my fingers can move on the keys. That is the blessing part of it. I love when I see a normal situation and my imagination kicks into gear. The next thing I know, this one simple event has become the basis for a great story that's developing and I have to run for one of my many notepads to write it down before I forgot, or before my mind moves onto different topics. And yes, my mind can jump through topic so fast that sometimes I can't keep up and I forget what I was thinking about in the hurry to figure out where it's going next.

Fun as that is, and as entertained as I keep myself and others around me, I also find that it can be a curse.
For example - the number one rule for my overactive imagination is this - NO SCARY MOVIES!! NONE!!!
For some reason my imagination cannot differentiate between reality and fiction. In college my roommates did not think I was being serious, and they insisted we watch a scary movie for Halloween. I tried to explain to them over and over that this was a bad idea. Let's just say they were warned! *grins*
They told me that if I seriously was too scared that they would stay up with me all night if they had to ..... well, we were up all night! They never tried to convince me to watch a scary movie with them again.

So the other night I was trying to imagine a scene, for one of my stories, in which a woman loses her husband to a car accident. I was laying in bed contemplating how she would feel, what she would do with her life, what her choices were and how she would react. Well, my overactive imagination worked a little too well ...
My husband had already fallen asleep but my active brain was keeping me awake. After a couple of hours I found myself curled up next to him sobbing into his shoulder and saying "Never die OK  You are never aloud to die on me! Don't you dare ever die on me!" Poor guy woke up going "wait, what?" Apparently my imagination worked too well. It was awful - but at least I can now write that scene convincingly, I think...

Yup, that's how my imagination works! And now here I find myself on 5 hours of sleep, wondering why I am awake at this hour ...... Oh yeah, that's right, my brain decided it wanted to be too active to sleep! So I'm up writing a blog and preparing to add more to my story.

What kind of trouble does your overactive imagination get you into?