Near scare and an awesome idea for the next novel

I wrote 1,780 words this morning–not bad.  After such a good start, I figured I’d finish the last 720 for the day after finishing the day’s errands.

Long story short, when I finally settled in at 11pm to do a little writing before going to bed, I had some weird problems.  Openoffice froze up, I ended it prematurely, and it turned out that that somehow corrupted one of the files I had opened.  Instead of being 370 KB, it was now over 1,000 KB, and every time I tried to write something,  it froze up for nearly half a minute.

In the end, I had to delete it.

Fortunately, this was NOT the main file for Mercenary Savior. Thank goodness!  It was just the revision notes.  I had copies of both (both about a week old), but I’m glad it wasn’t the main file, because I’d have lost over thirty pages of revisions.  Yikes.

On a totally different note, I had an awesome dream this morning–one that I’m totally using in next novel I’m going to write (probably recycling much of Hero in Exile).  It’s hard to describe it exactly, which is why I added this really weird picture to this post.

You may be wondering, “what the crap is that supposed to be?” I’ll tell you: it’s Arab.  It’s Arab on so many different levels it makes me happy inside.  I took it from the facebook profile pictures album of an old friend of mine from the ELC in Provo.  What’s so Arab about it?  Well, there’s 1) King Abdullah II 2) in battle fatigues 3) waving to the people 4) with an eagle in the background 5) wearing a Bedouin hutta 6) and some kind of military insignia on the agal.  So freaking Arab.

So what was my dream?  Well, it was kind of like a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and…a lot of weird stuff.  At one point, King Hussein of Jordan commanded me to go into the desert east of Jerusalem and raise an army.  I had a lot of questions, so he explained exactly what he wanted me to do–and in so doing,  he explained exactly how the Bedouin fight wars.

Instead of keeping a standing army, a military leader must draw the warriors of the other tribes to his banner through his charisma, egalitarianism, reputation, etc.  The warriors join his campaign, not to serve some grand concept of country, but to win spoils and glory.  Once the campaign ends, they disband and return to their tribes until the next leader rallies them together.

Because of the way this works, a charismatic leader can pass through the desert virtually by himself, only to come out on the other side with a fearsome army.  This is what happened in Lawrence of Arabia when Lawrence took Aqaba–he passed through the desert with a token force of barely fifty men, but the feat (and his brilliant diplomatic skills) so impressed the Bedouins on the other side that they rallied to him and stormed the city.  From the Turks’ point of view, the army came out of nowhere and crushed them.

So that’s what I’m thinking I need to do at some point in my next novel: have the main character, poor and destitute, go out to the desert and rally the tribes with nothing but his charisma.  I’ve already got the rough (VERY rough) outline of the story in my head, and this plot point fits perfectly into this one section where I was worrying that things lagged too much.

Oh man, I’ve got such awesome plans for this book!  But first, must revise Mercenary Savior and send it out.  Don’t worry, I’m enthusiastic about that project, too. It will get done!  Momentum is building–I’ll  more than make up those 720 words tomorrow.