Countdown officially starts, 32 days till we leave on vacation. Probably ought to start making lists of everything I want to get done or take care of before we go, and the things I want to take with us. Top of the list will be clearing out and setting the DVR.
I am dreaming about writing every night now. The dreams are weird and peppered with burrito and Walking Dead stuff, but mostly about writing. My dead mother has showed up in all of them, got a little bossy in one. In the dreams I have to find things, like a strange Easter egg hunt, because the objects are crucial to the next step of moving forward. There are lots of rooms with lots of things going on. Last night was mostly in a lounge-sized room in the basement of a huge hotel or something, everything was dark red- carpet, drapes, furniture- and a pool filled up most of the floor, and some kind of small whale filled up the pool. I couldn't believe parents were letting their toddlers swim in the pool without supervision, and then I started finding kids without parents and had to get them matched back up, and then of course we needed to find someone's bottle, but through ALL of this I was working on constructing phrases and proofreading and my unnumbered pages all got scattered. That was nothing compared to the nights before, filled with crazy elevators in very tall buildings and the laws of physics were changed. Last year around this time I was stressing out about flying on vacation for the first time in years and kept dreaming of washing machines breaking down and flooding and having to wring out piles and piles of clothes. My stress dreams are something else.
The most important thing I can do today is ask my submission rep how in the world 'everything in one file' works. I'm so used to working across scattered blogs with thousands of separate post links, pulling my stuff together to lump into 'one file' goes against my nature. I can understand the layout, I've done professional work, but this new online dropbox feels as spooky as the the slot in the wall at the correction center on Camazotz. I'm allowed to submit up to so many words as per my contract- does this include the extra stuff outside of the actual content? I have several more silly questions along that line, but I keep telling myself once this first time is over, the rest will be a breeze. I've got 15 working titles lined up, most of them sketched out a little, and once I go deep in my cave and DO this, I hope it flows as easily as my blogs do for me. I can't help thinking of the old woman in Mostly Harmless who drags her photocopier out of her cave and hooks up the solar panels.
In the meantime- lists and some solid gold dancing.
