Welcome to the next instalment of my nightmare log that has been sitting in my drafts for about a year (not for the faint of heart):

It came to me in a dream, this wonderful book that I am planning to write. I have been writing it for a while now, but the story refuses to be told. It does not want to be finished and has wrapped itself around my mind like a dark silken scarf, ready to squeeze and drain me dry.

What was it again, this story of mine?

It was a tale of grand deeds and complicated magics, enacting itself on the canvas of my eyelids in great detail; searing into my mind like a burning errant thread that needs to be pulled from its cloth until it has been fully told. And then just as I sat down to write it, I lost it.

As I turned on the light and bent over my notes, a crick in my neck, both my neck and my back sore from tossing and turning all night to chase the dream; my mind full of adrenaline and eyes bright with the feverish gleam of yet another untold tale; it fled. I was so sure this would have been the one, the story above all others that would unfold perfectly into a book, into my first epic debut novel, that it would have finally lent meaning to all my nightly terrors and all the imaginary lives that I have been forced to live through the years.

But no. Disappointment haunts my heels again. A terrible itch to write, to start something and perhaps lure the tale back again, is all that is left.

They are fickle beasts, these stories of mine. They’ve led me on a merry chase ever since I can remember, forcing me to live through heroic and gruesome battles, grandiose romances and betrayals and the countless deaths of loved ones that I’ll never know, again and again and again. And every time I think I have one that I could truly tell in all of its glory, it flees.

Sometimes I can almost see it gliding away like a wisp of pure crimson on a non-existent wind, as if it wanted to tease me by hovering close and then fleeing altogether. It is a raw, sweet torture like no other, to feel the tales violently invade your mind and consume it until all that’s left is their will to be told; their command the only thing you can even coherently acknowledge, because nothing else matters in that simple, perfect barrage of inspiration.

To have them gently caress your mind as you hover on the edge of waking, whispering promises of how grand a book you will write together and weaving a future of crimson creativity that will never be. Until they turn to floating wisp and leave you, betrayed and broken and infested with a rotten itch to write and write and nothing to write about. And the more you chase after them, the more they laugh in the back of your mind and flick their dirty seductive tongues, licking up a path of crimson behind your ear as if they’d earned the right.

Oh, but to feel mine wrapped around me just once again! What wouldn’t I give to get but a glimpse of what that story was…

What was it again, this story of mine? It was such a grand tale, such a perfect, mature specimen of literature potential. Such a book we could have made…