Dreams

1. I dreamt that I walked into my house, ready for a day of sweat and work and fixing things, and instead I found it cool and clean. The bedroom was one gigantic bed, onto which my love (He just magically appeared. From where, you ask? The closet, mayhaps?) pushed me. Soft fade . . . End dream.

Now, if the dreams had stayed this way, I wouldn't be awake at 4:30 asking myself if I'd perhaps ingested acid along with my creme brulee.

2. This next scene takes place in the woods, where all the woodland creatures have gathered together and decided that they want to form an orchestra. In the dream, both creatures and instruments are life-size, and there is a talking squirrel whose life-goal is to play the cello. Such an instrument would surely crush him, so he has to settle for playing a violin upright instead. He suffers a feeling of inadequacy at being too small to accomplish his dream.

3 - ?. A series of dreams following different creatures and their instruments of choice.

It was like those kids' shows, where you're certain that the writers have to be on drugs.

Some writers – the better ones, I've always thought – can see entire story and character arcs and how they all entwine before ever putting a word onto a page.

I generally have vague ideas for arcs, fueled by one or two sentences that emblazon themselves rather conspicuously in my mind. Those assemblages of words seem, for the first few hours, the most brilliant sentences of which anyone has ever conceived – then, I invariably pick the poor things apart or stick them into some lackluster piece where they don't really belong.

But today, I had an unsolicited flash of words that actually fit into a much larger arc that I'm just beginning to write.

The teaser: “From that moment forward, she realized, she had put her every effort into acting as a void, so that no one could ever again grip her so tightly without her consent. Soon, she came to realize that being a black hole had its advantages – men, and the occasional creatively minded woman, are easily flattered into believing that they can fill, completely and entirely, the largest of gaping holes, but rarely do they ever plumb the depths enough to do so effectively. She could finally flow freely, being neither stopped up nor pinned down, merely by letting those around her believe that she was fulfilled in her apparent position as a vapid subordinate.”

Yes, it's full of obvious sexual imagery, and flattering to neither sex, and I like it that way.

I do need to find some more creative synonyms in places, though.

Settling Back into Normal

. . .Sort of. Normal will be when I have a space to call my own again.

Still, there is a but, and that but is that, so far, today is the first day in recent memory (more realistically, the past month) that I have neither wanted nor succumbed to the desire to manage pain with painkillers. If I weren't terrified of breaking the trend, I'd dance my little feet off with joy.

Granted, the day's not over yet, but I have my fingers crossed.

For over a week now, I've made a point of neither opening nor deleting an e-mail from Amazon.com. It tells me that I can save (or, more accurately, not spend) 34% of the price of a book titled, Write is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses.

I leave it there partly for the absurdity of it. If I were to purchase such a book, I wouldn't immediately sit down and commence to write -- I'd read the book. Then I'd feel like I'd done something productive towards my work, not write, and wait for the next motivational text to cross my desk so that I might feel some pretense towards a vague idea of actualization.

I also leave it there so that every time I check my inbox, I see in bold that I need to affix my ass to a chair and type or scribble until I collapse from exhaustion.

So, let's add, "checking my e-mail," to the list of activities that make me feel guilty and put me on the defensive. Maybe, just maybe, I'll back myself into enough of a corner that actually getting work done is the only thing I can do without guilt.