Your story needs to be written when it never leaves your thoughts.
And by never, I mean never. In between thoughts about your wife or husband, whether or not you need to pick up dog food, if the cable bill's been paid, if your kid's getting a cold, that idea is still nagging you. That's the idea you should grab. How long it has to bake in the oven of your head is totally up to you, but every story will eventually come out somewhere. It'll have to get typed out.
For eight months I have had a crystal clear mental image dancing inside my head. The image is of a man in some sort of spacesuit colliding with cockpit glass. There are many unknown qualities. I do not know what sort of suit, specifically, the man is wearing, nor do I know what the cockpit is for. There is instrumentation in front of me. There are stars and an asteroid field beyond the man.
I have many gut feelings about the man: I have a gut feeling he was thrown away by someone. He might be dead. He might not. There is only one certainty, that this man has persisted in my brain in the midst of a turbulent period in which I have moved twice, had a second child, and had a significant career change. All these things, and I am still wondering what's going on with this guy. I want to help him. I want to know who left him in the cold of space. The strangest part is that I am by no means a writer interested in pursuing the well-trawled ocean of science-fiction--so I frequently remind myself that Alien was not a science-fiction movie, it was a horror movie. The setting was an sf one.
My second daughter, Emily, was born on 19 January at around 0409 hours. She's fine. So far she's taken a liking to the following: breasts, Family Guy, and movies in which there is a horn section. Her mother likes neither death metal nor science-fiction. She likes your local dance music station and horror movies but despite these obvious character flaws she's a lovely woman with whom I share a love of Tennessee whiskey and Superbad. She misunderstands my present preoccupation with men floating in space, but I try daily to tell her that I love her and unknown at least space-men equally.
Her only major complaint is that I smoke a lot whilst deep in the throes of the writing process. I also talk to myself a lot (this is mostly to discover the pace and the point of the dialogue, but a case could be made for deep-seated mental instability as well). To put the icing on, I have an innate attraction to death metal, and I listen to it loudly while writing. Unfortunately this helps neither my daughter's sleeping nor my girlfriend's serenity.
Three days ago I began to write about this guy. It seems that he is in dire shape. He's not dead, not exactly, and his suit has been damaged by some outside agent. I know a little of his backstory. but not much--as an example, I know that he is normally able to withstand deepspace, but I do not know his name. I suppose the possibility exists that he doesn't have a name in the traditional sense. Many's the time I've thrown aside a story idea when I can't get the story to go where it wants, or if it refuses to go anywhere. I'm not talking about writer's block. I'm talking about any sort of realistic, plot-closing outcome worthy of "The End". But I can't clear my cache of this guy.
In between the moments of real life--new baby, getting the new cable hookups sorted out, working the occasional fifteen-hour day and being unable to think any deep thoughts upon arrival at the temporary homestead--I've been writing longhand and for all its failings it's been shockingly intimate. The most obvious failing is that I type faster than I write but my handwriting is clear and somewhat elegant for a man, so it looks nice. An obvious boon is that you don't have to print it. It's been running itself off well thus far but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's going to be of moderate length, which sucks for publishing reasons (not that I've published much).
I like my job so ideally I'd like to be able to supplement my decent income with some writing income but I'm not holding my breath. In any event it's difficult to write when there's a cranky kid behind you somewhere, complaining because she's constipated. The ball-and-chain becomes frustrated easily being that this is her first child--I spread my seed as far as I can, apparently--so I try to spare her the fussy baby when I can. Still, the baby seems to enjoy the sound of fingers hitting keyboard, and I'm sure this is largely genetic: very little relaxes me so much as that uninterrupting clicking sound, especially when the typist doesn't smash the fucking keyboard all to shit.
So, I have been rescuing this floating man as best I can. I'll let you know if I manage to get him inside somewhere warm and safe. It's the least I can do for him. And myself. I'll keep the deus ex machina to a minimum and I'll re-read Strunk and White and I'll delete all the adverbs I can. I'll use only the word "said" for dialogue attribution. And hopefully, in a few months, my baby won't be crying as much, my roof will be my own and my space man will finally wake up.