I have a very rocky relationship with my subconscious.
On the one hand, my subconscious is the font of my best ideas. Even when I writing something that has come mostly from ego-brain thinking, it inserts cool things, catches ideas that I missed the first time around. It’s sometimes like having a better writer sitting on your shoulder catching your missed opportunities.
On the other hand, my subconscious’s interests are not always marketable interests. My subconscious feeds me stories about Kansas about once a week. The state needs to start writing me checks for the PR. Lord knows they need a positive face what with all the wackos that populate my home state. So I write a lot of stories about Kansas or set in Kansas. I’ve yet to find a market for that stuff, and I doubt anyone wants to read about it. And yet my subconscious persists. I’m wrestling with Potatohead (that’s what I call my subconscious) right now about a story that involves mole men and Kansas. Excited to read that one? Yeah, didn’t think so. I keep telling him, we need postsingularity stories that use the entire galaxy as their setting. We need fantasy stories that take place in the New York subway system. What does he feed me? A story about a woman whose abusive dead husband comes back made out of potatoes after being buried int he garden.
Yeah, I actually wrote that one. The rejection Nick gave it at Clarkesworld was enough to put me off writing for a year. Not one you’ll probably ever read. There are a lot of these.
On rare occasions, one of us presents an idea that the other finds just as fascinating. My story “The Yeti Behind Me” is a good example. The idea of ghosts of extinct animals popped up in conversation. I felt the indication of Potatohead’s interest in the form of an explosion just behind my right eye. Potatohead is not subtle. But if we agree on something straight away, I know it’s got legs.
Problem has been, lately, I have stopped trusting Potatohead. He’s fixated on the same things much of the time. He’s not giving me ideas that I can get excited about. And vice versa. I spend all day thinking of story ideas and asking “Hey, Potatohead, what do you think of this one?” His response is generally a resounding “meh.”
I feel like the two parts of my brain are at war lately Each one knows something useful about writing, but they are not agreeing on things nearly often enough for me to feel like I’m moving forward with my “career.” I can write stories based primarily on the input of one half, but those stories are flat, and aren’t going to take me anywhere.
There’s one other, unrelated thing about Potatohead that ticks me off. When I’m asleep, people can talk directly to Potatohead. I have had long and varied conversations in my sleep that I conciously have no recollection of. The thing that gets me into trouble is, Potatohead doesn’t know that I/we are married.
Sarah has come to bed late on several occasions, only to see me shoot upright in bed and demand “Who is that?”
“It’s me,” she says.
“Me WHO?” Potatohead asks.
“Sarah,” she says, beginning to be a bit more exasperated.
“Sarah WHO?”
And that’s the last straw. “Your WIFE,” she snaps. “Go back to sleep.”
“Oh. Okay,” says Potatohead and down he goes back to where he came. And the only indicator I have that this conversation ever happened is that my wife is pissed at me all morning for no apparent reason.
How does one force his or her two minds to sit down and come to some kind of amicable agreement? We have crap that needs to get worked out if we are going to continue to make a career of working together. This partnership is turning sour, and I need to straighten things out quickly. I also need to get it through Potatohead’s half-brain that asking “Sarah WHO?” is not a good thing for either of us. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
