This morning I woke up, stared at the ceiling and said just one word: “Bizarre.” The reason for this utterance was that last night I had a string of very odd dreams indeed – odd enough that they stuck in my mind for a while afterwards. Something about Triffids, goblins, hunting and aliens, which seems to be a combination of elements that is immensely bizarre.

This, naturally, got me thinking on my way in to work. What sparks these things off? Is it some churning roil in the subconscious or is it just the fact that occasionally the imagination stores things up and then decides on having a major party with as many ridiculous parts as possible?

(I had a third theory, which was to ask Kathleen if we had cheese last night. No, she replied, and in any case she pointed out that I had cooked supper, so I should have known. Had she added any magic invisible cheese I asked, whereupon she gave me a funny look, told me to have some coffee and gave Tiggy his morning insulin look. Tiggy is much better by the way.)

I constantly wonder why my brain comes up with these odd things. But then, where does inspiration come from in the first place? Where does that moment of “Oh hell, why didn’t I think of that before?” originate from?

Dreams aside, this is something I’ve been thinking about over the past few days. Like Lady Miko I am a big fan of fan fiction, the noble art of taking characters from a book, film, tv programme or manga and then making them jump through the hoops of your imagination. You can take these people in the direction that you feel they should be heading in (the original writers can be a bit odd sometimes due to network/publishing/censorship reasons) and have a lot of fun in the process.

Of course there are times when things get a bit peculiar in the land of fan fiction. Quite a few teenagers write it, and there are times when I want to shout things like “Learn to bloody spell! And get a rudimentary grasp of cause and effect!”, but hell if they’re writing then they’ve started off down the road to being a writer so good for them.

The real oddness so often comes from my particular favourites – crossovers. This is when you take one element and you cross it with another. Harry Potter meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS for short) is one example. Stargate meets Battlestar Galactica is another. Sometimes these work wonderfully. Sometimes it’s a train wreck.

It’s also somewhat addictive. Back in 2004 I started writing what I thought would be a relatively short story, in which I gave Xander Harris from BtVS the memories of Obi-Won Kenobi. By the time that I finished the bloody thing I’d written 230,955 words in 28 chapters. The sequel (which inevitably then appeared in my mind) has 40 chapters so far. It’s 423,591 words long. And it’s not finished.

The point I’m labouring to make here is that there are times when things appear my head and I have no clue where they came from. They’re often called plot bunnies, as they hop about in your brain until you get so distracted that you have to bite the bullet and write the story that they’ve inspired.

The most extreme example of this occurred when I crossed BtVS with Father Ted. Or the tribbles from Star Trek with Star Wars (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2378726/2/Vaders_Problem if anyone’s feeling bored).

Of course what I really should be doing is using all this excess imagination to write a book that I possess the copyright to. I know that that’s what Kathleen would like me to do. And I will. After I finish another chapter or two of fan fiction…