DREAM
I'm watching two of my characters from the Lost Atlantis series make peace with an alien race.
The aliens look mostly human. Some of them look completely human. It's just that they often have a rougher, more animal-like quality to them.
There's a big ceremony in a sports stadium to celebrate the peace between our two races. The two characters negotiating the peace, Shem and Sandi, enter into a large "space taxi" ship afterwards and head for home.
On the way home, the aliens they're in the ship with attack them with flying discs and swords, and all the humans die, not just in the space taxi, but all over the planet. They were all completely taken by surprise.
I think to myself, "That's not how I want the book to end!"
I rewind the events in my mind until I set the scene so that Sandi sees a slit opening up in the forehead of one of the aliens just before a killer disc comes flying out of it. I play the events.
Sandi is able to warn everyone about this subtle indicator that there will be an attack. It seems that just knowing about this indicator is enough to pass on the knowledge to every other human on the planet, and so everyone has a couple of seconds warning to get out of the way, or subdue the androids. I realize that's a problem in terms of logic.
I'm not sure how she's supposed to actually stop the discs, so I think about that for a while. I think about her using her hands to block the opening. That won't work. I think about her blowing on the opening and that will take care of it.
No, that's really quite a silly idea.
I skip that problem too for now, and just run the scene as though the two characters are utterly destroying the aliens. And the battle on the rest of Earth goes successfully as well after a great deal of struggling. For one thing, a lot of these aliens/androids look perfectly human, so no one knows they aren't until the last minute, when that slit appears in the forehead.
I really like the way that scenario ran. Now, I just need some logical connections between some of these events.
INTERPRETATION
I'm working on a comedic book for the first time, and I'm finding that it requires a lot more thinking and rearranging and experimenting than I'm used to. It's much slower going. I wonder if this is because I don't have a system in place for exercises to do every day to bring out the humor in everyday life. It could also just be that this is a new experience, so it's getting my brain working out neurons that have been underutilized.
Right now, I'm mainly making logical connections between jokes into a storyline. I don't think it's the best or only way to get the job done, but it's what I'm doing. Hopefully, I can eventually come up with a way to consistently create funny material in the future.
