Gorgeous Day, Bad Dream

I won't tell you the details about what is really going on in my life but I'll bet you can guess by my dream....

I dreamed I was on trial. For the first five minutes of the trial I was alert and then I zoned out, it was as if I couldn't process anything intelligent. Then the judge slams his gavel down and says, "guilty." The odd thing is the court room disburses and now I don't know what to do. Do I pay a fine or am I to be in jail for six months? So I'm asking the security guard what to do and he doesn't know. He tells me to wait here in this empty room. I realize I've left my purse in the courtroom. I want to search for it but the judge tells me that he gave it to the security guard. The judge tells me the purse they found was brown with snaps on either side. I'm trying to figure out if he can't tell the difference between brown and burgundy. Then realize I have a child's purse in a tote bag that is brown corduroy and it has two snaps. Did he mean this one? Wait he's gone. The security guard comes in and lays down to sleep (not sex) with three other people. I'm worried about my purse and don't want to leave the building to search my car in case I was supposed to go to jail and they claim I was trying to escape. The dream goes on and then morphs to other things having nothing to do with the trial.

I've been working all day in the yard. The consequence of this is that the house looks like a homeless shelter.

Incognito

The Economist reports "Evidence mounts that brains decide before their owners know about it." What the article reinforces for me is what I've heard a handful of writers say, that they write while they sleep. Many of them wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to their problem or when they first wake up the writing flows. I've begun to do that now. I didn't in the beginning when I wrote but here lately I've figured out that if I worry a problem right before I go to bed, when I wake up I often have the solution. There is a downside (isn't there always?) I sometimes wake up at 1 or 2 in the morning clearly upset that I haven't figured out the problem. It's as if there was no wake up time. I was asleep and I'm awake thinking of the problem and then finally I'm aware that I'm awake instead of sleeping.

This might explain why I feel a powerful desire to nap during the day.

It's a good thing there is a bed in the office.

Spring

Yesterday I met a woman who told me that on the day she was diagnosed with cancer she went home and took the pain pill they had given her to take after the biopsy. She lay down on the bed wondering how she was going to break the news to her husband. When she woke a state trooper was on her front step. She never had to tell her husband about the cancer.

One day a major network arranged to follow Nicholas Sparks around in a "Day in the Life of a Writer," production. As the evening was winding down and the camera crew was about to shut everything off he got a phone call. His father had passed away. It was filmed but as a courtesy to him they didn't broadcast this.

You can't put stuff like that in fiction and have people believe it is real.

I'm not obsessed with death. The lady at the bank was still grieving deeply for her husband which is why she told a perfect stranger this story. I happen to like to read memoirs and if you look at the theme in Nicholas Sparks's memoir you'll notice he contrasts extreme luck with extreme tragedy. This was but one of the many stories he told that followed that theme.

Royalty Statement

Royalty Statement

Lynn Viehl Twilight Fall

This author has published her royalty statement and then in her blog she wrote about it. This is worth reading especially for novices like myself. She is in the top twenty of the NYT Bestseller lists and is she wealthy? A school teacher makes more money.

Well, I guess I got in it for the money. I dreamed I'd be rich writing. As a little kid though what appealed to me most was that I could live at home and make a living. The home I dreamed of had 3 rooms and was built of logs. As a mother with small children my daydreams of wealth grew bigger. In the end though I learned I will never make much money as an author and still I write. I quit in a fit of depression, I go back, I write some more and here lately I've begun talking to people about my latest project. I have never done that before.

Gotta go. I found a little book on mountain wisdom. So far it's been disappointing because it is old cliches. A penny saved is a penny earned. That isn't even mountain wisdom, just a testament to how extensively Benjamin Franklin's words penetrated the American psyche.

Almost feels like normal

Life is starting to feel like normal again. I'm a bit tired, sleep deprived, but not so much so that I can't function.

So the question is, how do you turn life into fiction? The first day I was in the hospital waiting I craved my notebook and pen. By the second day I was so sleep deprived and stressed I was no longer able to think and write though again I craved it. I think what I craved was a sense of what is normal in my life. I doubt that I really had a story to tell because I haven't been able to get anything on paper since life returned to its semi-normal state though the conversation between Myrtle and Stella keeps popping into my head and it did even then. (The story is 1930's which is why I used old names). Maybe I just wanted to work on the conversation since it would mean escape from the stress and back into normal. Also it had to do with death even prior to this incident so the fear that my husband would die played into that. Writing out Stella's response to death would help validate and define my own response to the threat of loss.

You know, that's a question I should ask the next time I go to a Writing Show, "When you're under stress related to life —not deadlines—do you use your writing to escape it?" I'll have to think about that question, put it in better words, because I would imagine the first response would be, "No? Are you kidding me? My spouse is in the hospital and I'm going to write?" But it isn't about work at that point, it's about why a person would have chosen to write in the first place, defining your life in words rather than paint, sewing, website design, architecture, etc. you know the various creative activities people do to define their world and express themselves which happen to also become a career.

Writing

I'm here but family illness has kept me from blogging. Right now I feel like the grackle the hawk has caught. I'm trying to channel some of that emotion into writing but my creativity isn't cooperating nor is my ability to focus.

There is nothing like the fear of losing a loved one to make you see the world differently.

Weeding Writing

I like to work in the garden. I don't mind weed pulling at all. At least to a certain extent. It feels good to pull them and see the space all around where they used to be and know that in another couple weeks I'll spread my flower seeds. I see the tips of gladiolus coming out the ground. My red tulips are blooming, the daffodils will be gone soon, but hey they're blooming now and absolutely gorgeous as is the camellia shrub.

The thing is the weeds grow back constantly and they do it faster than the desirable flowers can grow. I suppose this is why they're called weeds. I could just keep an indoor garden where the weeds can't reach. Right now my lemon tree is blooming and the sun room smells like a perfume counter without the annoying mixture of unpleasant smells from the outer reaches of the world.

I like sunshine and I like the outdoors. I like to keep my indoor plants outside during the warmer months. My writing is like this too.

I feel like I'm constantly weeding the words. It feels good but... I've cut out a lot of unnecessary words. This part is great. I now need to fill in where the story seems bare. Sigh let more weeds grow. I then have to weed them out again. The cycle seems never ending. After a time I start to feel like I'm getting nowhere. The flower plants are merely growing and I haven't seen any blooms yet. There is always the chance of a late snow or prolonged drought that will kill them even after all my hard work. Of course, the drought comes when I'm out of town. Anyway, it sometimes feels as if I'm staring at the flowers when they finally bloom and instead of enjoying them I'm thinking about the weeds all around them that I need to snatch. It's hard to relax in the garden, there is so much work to be done.

It's hard to enjoy my story, the one I'm working on, because I can't just read it the way a person who has never seen it reads it. I don't enjoy the small line here or there that is well written because I'm focused on the words that need weeding all around that line.

It's been a week since I did any writing at all. I seem to have this problem where my mind wants to write, I know what needs to be done, I know exactly where the next paragraph should go and what it should say. I can't discipline myself to write. I feel overwhelmed as if the upteen hours I spent weeding a section of the garden were wasted because already a fresh batch of weeds has crept in.

I wonder if other writers have the same problem, you know, just the feeling that it's a never ending job and sometimes you get so caught up in the editing you can't enjoy the story even when it's good.

Reading

The daffodils have nothing to do with this post. They're blooming, they're beautiful and they're so abundant in my yard I have 3 vases of them in my house and you still can't see where I've picked them.

In the meantime I was banned from the computer yesterday as my husband searched for this conflickr virus thing. Things haven't exactly been going the way I want them to in my life and I seem to be focusing on the more negative things. So I went to the library and was lucky that someone had decided to shed most of their Evanovich books. I read two in a single day. This is a record for me. I usually don't read that much. She is funny and lighthearted and I really enjoyed them.

Erica blogged about defining failure and success in your life. On my better days I can list this as being financially secure (as well as anyone else is, life throws you curve balls and lay-offs are looming, but at the moment we feel safe). My kids are doing fairly well in school. They aren't what some people regard as the A group (you know most popular) but they are not outcasts either. As far as I can tell they're happy. I don't get much in the way of complaints (we won't discuss last night's argument over bathing suit styles). My husband and I are happy with our marriage. We get to go places and do things. Life is more than just survival. I have my health. After learning so much about other people's health problems I have to say I take that one for granted.

So the downside is when I start to feel depressed. I tried mutliple times to get published in Chicken Soup for the Soul. I was told it's hard, you know, you really have to be good. My sister spends a half hour writing up a story and her Chicken Soup for the Soul book arrived with her story in it last month. I get a notice that so and so wrote a story that is now on the front cover of a magazine with 100,000 circulation. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will probably be steel toe and fall on my bare feet.

At the moment I'm really struggling with the question. Do I stay with it or face reality?