I love my dreams

Many of my stories start out as dreams. I'm grateful for the gift, but writing the stories down does have a tendency to spoil all those lovely dream emotions I wake with, as I then have to face hard reality. Suxh as, how to make something that seemed so plausible in my dreams, logical to the waking mind.

Most often my dreams are like incomplete movies playing out in my head, but the really precious ones, the ones that can influence my whole mood for a day or two, are those that I experience emotionally rather than simply watching them unfold. Is this just me, or do you also have dreams that take you through an emotional wringer too?

I had one of those dreams in the early hours of this morning. What was really special about this one is that this story wasn't just a snippet but the entire story; from the time the characters met, through their joy of falling in love, their darkest moments, until they reached their Happy Ever After. Trust me when I say that waking from a dream like that is almost impossible. I wanted to lie buried in the duvet and hang onto those good HEA vibes forever.

But at last I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed pen and paper and tried to capture the feeling. Only as I wrote I realised this story would never work as a category romance. The reason is the hero: he's the ultimate Player, whose bad boy days aren't all in the past. He's a man who drifts from one woman to the next, sometimes moving on before the previous woman is even out the door. And the dream opened with the heroine meeting his current girlfriend. Not at all suitable for an Alpha male in a category romance.

Even so, I fell in love with him. (If you write romance, you know that it's very possible to fall in love with someone who doesn't exist!) I really believe that this hero deserves his moment, so maybe I'll have to save him up for a Single Title. Because a man like this is exactly the type of hero you want to see brought to his knees by the heroine. He's the reformed rake and of course we all want to be the heroine who reforms him.

This dream was incredible not just because it introduced me to a gorgeous hero, but because it also opened my eyes to something I've never experienced first hand: The Proposal. In real life mine went along the lines of an offhand "so let's get married." At the time, the whole getting down on one knee thing seemed terribly outdated. But in the early hours of this morning I discovered the heart stopping magic of having a man go down on his knees to propose. My nameless hero even went a step further ... he offered to give up everything he had to be with the heroine, he loved her so much.

Now what waking reality can possibly measure up to that?