Dream #25

I was in the main room of an old, Victorian house with PB and a group of several others. We were going to be attacked from unknown, supernatural assailants and we could only defeat them by each playing our own music on those old Underwood typewriters. It was going to somehow simultaneously harmonize at the precise moment and send out some sort of musical blast that would shatter the creatures at just the right moment. The girl who was sitting next to me had given me some other, electric typewriter instead. PB and I were upset with each other but not saying anything. We had been involved in the past and I had left him or he had left me and there was all of this tension. So somehow the wrong typewriter was representative of things being wrong between us. I started flipping out that this wasn't going to work without the Underwood and he drags me off into some other room and we start yelling at each other that it's the other's fault. He yells at me that I left him and it's my fault and why would I do that and I scream back, "I did it to save your life!" and then clap my hands over my mouth like I wasn't supposed to ever let him know that. He's all shocked and asks, "What?" I finally let it out (after three years, apparently - oh, and apparently I'm psychic and have visions and am occasionally being controlled by some one or some force) that I'd seen that if I had gone with him or not left him, that he would have died. I say to him quietly, "I would have given up anything to be with you. Everything. Except..." and he finishes with, "my life." 

And then we make out. 

So after that loveliness, we go back into the main room and the right typewriter is there, and I tell everybody the whole plan because now that I have my true love back and made out with him in the middle of the apocalypse, which always makes so much sense, I can be open again. And he and I sit next to each other at our typewriters and the whole group plays them like pianos and shatters all of the bad guys at the precise last moment and I have no idea who the other guys all were but yay, they were all saved, too. 

And then my alarm woke me up and I got a charlie horse and I had to walk to the bus in the snow and it sucked.

(forgive the punctuation, grammar, whatever)

Dream R and Book R (Dream #24)

This one was from a few days ago:

I told R (not my R, but his namesake) that I loved him. R also loved me, but had this weird ailment: his skin retained too much moisture. He told me that he had to go live in the desert because it was super dry and would keep his skin from...something. Excess wetness? Something weird and dreamy that doesn't make any sense at all in real life. I told him that we could have a long-distance relationship, because apparently my love for R didn't extend to living in the desert.

As far as book R goes, I have started the first chapter of the rough draft, finally. However, while working on that first paragraph, I began to have a feel for R's voice (good) and realized that I'll need to bulk up my science & math vocabulary to write him. I really did pick the most impossible book to write. And, since it had been so long since I'd worked on it, by the time I sat down and opened Scrivener, I couldn't even remember his best friend's name. I had been thinking Tom, not Alex(ander). I also remember almost nothing of the months of scientific research I did over the past year or so. Awesome. I'm going to have to work on it consistently if I want to retain enough to make any significant progress. 

However, that being said, I have a good feeling about it. I think the writing, slow that it is, has potential. I'm sure it will need a ton of editing, which fills me with dread, but I'm going to keep plodding forward. It's either that or go live in the desert with my fictional, wet-skinned boyfriend.

Missing: The Best Coaster in the World

Lost: one coaster with Michel Delacroix's "Le Moulin Rouge," backed in red felt.

Last seen: With ex-boyfriend, over a decade ago. 

You are sorely missed. A replacement has still not been found on ebay or etsy. In fact, you were sold in a set to somebody else on ebay in July because I missed that auction. 

I am still so very sad without you. If anybody knows where I can find you or your identical twin, please contact. Would pay a reward. Would be very grateful.

Why Brains?

So, three months (give or take) later, I'm mostly mentally recovered from my news, as long as I stay firmly planted in the delightful land of Denial. Basically, my new motto is to live my life and not think about brains too much. 

The problem is - my main character is a neuroscientist. He must be, or the book does not exist. The book may never exist, but if it is to have a chance, Reid must be a neuroscientist. Aside from the problems this causes my application for citizenship in Denial, this is also difficult because the applicant to Denial (me) has a mental block the size of the Great Wall of China when it comes to math and sciencey stuff. So, the things I need to know, which for another writer would mean a few hours sojourn to Google-land (no idea why I'm going with the citizenship lingo today - forgive me, will you?) mean for me months of pouring over scientific articles with dictionaries and Wikipedia at my side in order to figure out what any of it MEANS. And by the time I've made it through the articles and taken my notes and figured out what it all means, it's taken me long enough that I don't remember any of it. Well, maybe 15% of it. So, it's a ridiculously long process. 

So, now I sit, probably three years or more after the idea for the book with the best title ever came to me, the book born out of more than a decade alone, out of thousands of nights of loneliness and the things people do when they're alone and lonely and need to survive it, trying to bang out as many of my crazily detailed character profiles as I can in two 12-14 hour days, answering questions like what the circumstances were surrounding R's birth, or what kind of clothing does E wear, and that all sounds rather simple, but when R is a scientist and E is a painter and R's mom is a poet and his dad is in prison and E's parents are a Rabbi and a Cantor of Egyptian and French origin, it means things like figuring out where two people like that would have met and that means looking up student visa laws and maps and a million other things I didn't think about when I decided I had to write this book and no other before I could write any of the other books in my head like #2, which is already named Bouquets of Ampersands, another great title. 

And you may doubt my ability to write a book anybody would want to read from these blog posts nobody reads (unless I have in fact become a famous writer and my readers have found this blog a decade after I've written this post and are pouring back through my old entries and shaking their heads at my dreams, both awake and asleep) and that is understandable. Writing these blog posts is like having a coughing fit. There's this thing inside of you and you sit on the couch or stand in the shower willing your body to get out this thing inside of you until it comes in fits and spurts and travels through your body and out your fingers that have to punch the "o" super hard because I returned the lovely, expensive Alienware laptop and kept the cheap Acer instead, for grow-up responsible reasons like MONEY. Whereas a novel, on the other hand, involves lexicons wherein I write down lovely words and files upon files in the computer where I analyze sentence structure and spend thousands of hours pouring over those words and coaxing them into something worth reading and, if I'm right, something worth loving. 

So, why brains? I have no idea. Ask the zombie. Ask Reid. And tell me, after you're done, which is more real and which is more fictional. 

Update(ish)

Sometimes the answers you get aren't the ones you wanted. At least my hand's working now.

Paging Dr. House...

If anybody knows why my left hand isn't working, could you let me know? I'd rather not have to chop it off...

Dream #s 22, 23

In the first, my elementary-school best friend was renting (although not actually paying rent) the house I/my parents own and I was looking around it trying to decide whether or not I would live there, too. We were talking about simple things, like where to put my couch and whether the horrifying monsters that lived in the house would eat my cat or not...

The second ended with me utterly heartbroken, sobbing on the floor because I had just watched the love of my life die in front of me while M. tried to comfort me by telling me he was just the animatronic version of himself. What I want to know then is, was I mourning the actor of the character? Which was animatronic? 

Either way, I'm not in the best mood this morning.