Composting

That's a term Neil Gaiman uses to describe the process of filing ideas away into the bottom drawers of the id and forgetting about them, at least at the conscious level, and leaving your subconscious daemons to work on them.

Composting. Very apt.

So. It's 3:00am one crisp and freezing morning, and I've just flung myself out of bed and stumbled into three layers of winterwear with the sole purpose of stopping a catfight in progress. My strategy consists of letting that Sociopathic Black Cat stalk me, while I cleverly lead him out of our immediate neighbourhood, and away from our own cowardly feline. (I used to throw gravel at the SBC, but he dodges better than I can aim, and now the little bugger thinks it's a game we play.)

As I'm trudging round the block, listening out for the faint jingle of the SBC's collar, my subconscious daemons leap out and gesture frantically at me. Hell, a feature screenplay I'd abandoned two years earlier, is salvageable, they inform me. All I have to do is reposition the protagonist, rewrite the first act to focus on his family, disguise the supernatural elements in the second act...etc

That's nice, I told my subconscious daemons. But it's now half-past-bloody-three in the morning. I'm freezing, sleep-depped, and in a park. When I get home, I'm crawling back to bed. Write me a memo.

They didn't, of course. Let this be a lesson: don't annoy your daemons, and don't believe your cat when he insists he absolutely has to go out and the hour is smaller than the temperature. You'll regret it.