Come Back to Me! Please!

 by Jody Feldman

What haunts us?
There are ghosts of paths not taken.
There are the ghosts of botched encounters.
There are ghosts, literal ghosts, which I was going to write about this month...
Until a different ghost haunted me last week.
This ghost starts with a dream.

The two players:
A MOTHER, 36, who’s sitting by a bathtub, pondering a problem, watching
HER DAUGHTER, 6, covered with bubbles, giving her mom a most brilliant solution.

Now, I wasn’t dream-watching the interaction itself; rather, I was reading a detailed synopsis, complete with book cover, of a New York Times bestseller that I wish I would have written and knew I could have written if only I’d had the idea first. The review was accompanied by a bookmark (because every NYT review comes with a bookmark) outlining an equally detailed, envy-inducing marketing plan for the entire middle-grade series.

At some point, that dream faded and morphed into a connected one where, whoa! The book hadn’t been written yet! I just needed to remember the clever, mind-blowing twist that I’d conjured up!

Right.
It’s no spoiler to report that the dream vanished from my mind for the next 12 hours only to surge back with a vengeance and a longing and only those scant details (plus a couple others I’m withholding for now).

Unusual? No. Not dream-wise or lucid-thinking-wise. I’ve had great ideas I swore I’d remember later and, well, that’s why I write them down now, which mostly works. I did record one in a notebook; partially fleshed out, even. I’ve been looking for that notebook for 20 years. 

Frustrating? Yes. From time to time these things haunt me.
And last week’s dream or, rather, the brilliant synopsis will continue to haunt me until I come up with an ultra-successful story based on that spark... 
Or it will haunt me forever.

Jody Feldman is determined to drum up that spark from the scant details she can remember. Meanwhile, she is happy to have had ideas good enough to engage so many enthusiastic readers. (She loves getting those emails!) 

P.S. Is it plagiarism, or even too derivative, to write a story based on the NYT bestselling book that conjured itself up in your own head?
    —JF