A Weekend of the Virtual Bank Line

Friday night: I only remember the end of this dream. I had a vegetarian frog. It looked like a tree frog - a big head in relation to its body, but the whole thing was enormous. The size of a dinner plate. Its skin, rather than being smooth like a regular frog, was covered with fine green hair that looked like moss.

As a treat, I had smeared some avocado on a piece of cucumber. I threw it to the frog, who was sitting on a patch of sandy ground. It landed about 8 inches to the frog's left, so when it landed he tilted his big head and looked at it. Then he moved himself to the left to be closer to it.

Re-situated, he looked to the left, but it wasn't there anymore. He looked to the right, and it wasn't there either. He picked up his little froggy hands and didn't see it under them. He picked up his little froggy feet and didn't see it under them either. Because it was under his little froggy butt. I was getting really frustrated because vegetarian frogs are SO DUMB.

Saturday night: I was driving my truck. I don't drive it very often, because it's big and sucks up a prohibitive amount of gas, but on this occasion I needed it. I was coming through a neighborhood and trying to figure out how to from where I was to where I needed to be, and the only way I could figure it out was to drive through the lobby of car wash, then the wrong way down and alley. The alley let out onto a little residential street with gingerbread-looking houses in fabulous colors - mauve with brilliant blue trim or apricot with lavender. The houses themselves were all alike, but the paint jobs were spectacular.

The street was really steep, though, and I had come out onto it going a little faster than I had intended. It ended in a T-intersection, and I was heading right for someone's front yard. I was standing up on the brake, but still going too fast. I swerved left, hit my right-side tires on the curb, and rolled the truck into the yard.

The truck was on its side, and I realized that, while the houses were lovely and the grounds looked well-kept, they were actually quite soft and swampy. My truck was sinking. I jumped up and pushed the driver's side door open so that I could climb out, then stood on the front porch of the house and watched my truck sink out of sight in the lawn, which closed over it with nary a ripple.

A woman, hearing the commotion, opened the front door and saw me standing there in shock.

"My car is in your yard," I told her, staring at the lawn where the truck had been sucked in.

She looked over my shoulder and saw nothing.

"No, it isn't," she said right back. And I realized that it was useless to argue.

Sunday night: I was at a school. Or perhaps it was my job. Either way, there were a lot of people I saw every day, and a lot of them lived near me. There was one house that we had to visit because something awful was happening there. Not law enforcement kind of awful, but the place was neglected and the mail was piling up, even though we knew that someone still lived there.

My companion (whom I never saw clearly, so I couldn't even say whether it was a man or a woman) and I went to the house, and when we walked up to the door, we saw the most extraordinary thing: as we walked up, something that looked like a giant hand retreated through the doorway. The four fingers took up almost the entire doorway, and it was as though the hand were reaching through the doorway as we walked up and was snatched back.

My companion and I left in a hurry and did a little more research. Then, the POV of my dream shifted. I could see another woman, a neighbor of mine, writing a note and taking some things - a pair of glasses, some letters - over to this house. She let herself in with a key and put the things onto a sofa. The house was clean and tidy, and she left because she didn't want to disturb the occupant. It had been her husband, and when they broke up, the woman had left alone, leaving her young daughter with the husband.

But now, something was happening to the husband. One minute he would be a normal man, the next he would be a giant so huge that he filled the entire floor of the place, which was by no means small. His daughter, no more than 10, was doing her best to keep some semblance of normalcy in the house because she loved her father and he wasn't abusive or neglectful. He loved his daughter very much and took excellent care of her when he was his right size, but he never knew when the change would come over him or how long it would last.

It was hard to know the right thing to do.

Worlds Enough, and Time

I'm currently in that pleasant place where I'm working very hard editing one project and starting the wheel moving on the next one.

Whenever I'm in this place, I'm constantly irritated by the fact that I just don't have enough time. I have a job that's fairly demanding. Every minute I'm at work(okay, every minute except this one) is taken up with stuff. My "To Do" list currently stands at slightly short of 100 items, although many are tiny.

I have children who don't raise themselves. The little one, who's been an angel lately, has been wishing for more attention, more snuggles, more Mommy. The older one is trying very hard to assert her independence now that she's got her driver's license, but she's making very 16-year-old decisions that need a lot of guidance.

I have a husband and little doggies and in-laws. I have people who need attention, and I want to give them that attention because it feels good to do it. I'm one of those people who needs that attention. I've been running again, trying to put in an hour a night, but for every hour I spend running, there are sixty little things that I'm not doing.

I'm sure that everyone has this same dilemma. If I do this, I can't do that. It's part of being human, I know.

But if I could just write more, that would really be something. Wouldn't it?

Virtual Bank Line: The Data Thieves

I was at a work offsite, and my co-workers and I were leaving the conference site and walking toward a shuttle that would take us to the airport. As I walked down the hall, my phone rang and I stopped walking and ducked into a doorway to take the call. As I spoke, more people walked by making it hard to hear.

I looked into the room behind the door and, finding it empty, I ducked inside. Just before my conversation was over, I realized that I wasn't alone. In a corner, in a chair behind a large table, was a man in a dark suit. I hadn't seen him because the room lights were off and the dark suit matched the shadows.

"Good, you're here," he said after I hung up. "It's time to go. We have to get started."

He went on to tell me that I would be partnering with another agent, and the two of us had many important meetings to keep with other agents. I got into a sleek, black car with another man in a dark suit and we drove from place to place where the other man talked furtively with other people in dark suits. I never took part in these conversations, and I felt superfluous to the proceedings entirely.

Finally, while my "partner" was busy talking to someone, I took off. I ran through streets that looked like Disneyland - clean and not meant for cars. The buildings were too close together for car traffic and there were lots of tiny alleyways with little shops. I was trying to get my bearings so I could figure out how to get home when I realized that I had to hide. The "partner" would be looking for me, and it would be bad if he found me.

I joined what looked like a large team of women who were walking to practice for some sport. As they walked, they talked about and demonstrated various warm-up exercises for the upcoming event, so to fit in, I went along with their stretching and twisting. We got to the top of the hill, and I looked down to see that the entire hill was made of snow. There was a man at the top of the hill, half buried in the snow. I could only see his dreadlocks peeking out, so I separated from the group and went to talk to him.

This man told me about the data thieves. We all knew that the government had undertaken to control speech on a vast scale. It was the aim of the government to control not just all communication coming from regulated channels (print, broadcast and electronic media, etc.) but all communication everywhere. Conversations between human beings were regulated as well. It was impossible for husbands and wives to have private conversations between themselves without government intervention. The vehicle for the intervention were tiny transmitters hidden in things like both paper money and coins, any plastic card (including indentification cards, credit cards and discount cards given out by stores). They worked in areas about the size of a good-sized room, which meant that even if you put your wallet on the dresser and huddled in the closet to talk to someone, you were still in the grips of the transmitters.

Whenever anyone tried to have a conversation that was "contrary to the interests of government," their very THOUGHTS would be replaced by something entirely different, such that they wouldn't even be aware that the words coming out of their own mouths didn't conform to their original intent. You might have it in mind to tell someone that you saw a policeman beating an innocent bystander, but the words out of your mouth would say that you saw that lambchops were on sale at the market, and you yourself would not know of the substitution.

The data thieves were working to bring down this particularly heinous form of control. Because they had to function in society, they took interesting precautions like keeping their wallets in lead-lined boxes. They were working on ways of both foiling the government AND raising awareness of what was going on. But it was much more difficult than most people realized. Thus far, the only thing that the data thieves had been able to do was to take certain patterns of data out of the stream. For instance, it would be impossible to transmit the letter "T," so hings would come ou jus slighly off, and no make sense. Enough of these tiny gaps in the data and people would become aware that they were not creating their own communications - it was all being created for them, and the system was breaking down.

"So, why are you here?" I asked the dreadlocked man at the top of the snow hill.

"I'm trapped here. I can't get off the hill."

I looked and realized that it wasn't snow. It was more like silicon so fine that it looked like and acted like snow, and it was leaching the strength out of both of us. But it looked inviting and shiny and sparkly, and I turned and ran full-tilt down the hill to the bottom. I got to within a yard of the street, and turned and looked at the dreadlocked man at the top. He was looking down at me with longing, knowing that he had important things to do but couldn't do them. I ran back up the hill, glorying in the work of moving up a steep hill through thick snow. The work itself gave me more energy, so once I got to the top, I grabbed the dreadlocked man's hand and turned, pulling him down the hill after me. As we ran down the hill, the dreadlocked man picked up speed and by the time we got to the bottom, he was in the lead pulling me behind him and shouting about how we were going to help the data thieves.

In Process

Having finished the big edits to my book, it's time to put the spine back in. Originally I'd had the whole thing tied together by the sister of two of the characters, her story going back and forth between the other stories, but it didn't work and when I took it out, I was left with five separate stories.

Now, I'm stitching them all back together with a minor character that runs through all the stories. It's going to take some doing, but writing it in the first place took some doing.

Well, now that I've said it - I guess I should get weaving.

Round One is Over

It has taken me a couple of months, but I'm finally done with the first round of serious edits to my novel. I shaved about 20 pages from the original 250, and it came in at something like 74,000 words. Now that I have it down that far (with expectation that it will be kicked down in word count again during round 2) it's time to put some other stuff in.

- The main character must be expanded, his story encompassing the salient points of life after the Mexican Revolution.
- The story arc needs to be clarified, as each story must make it clear which sacrament it is meant to encompass.

This is where the rubber meets the road, ladies and gentlemen.

Genius in the Making

My younger daughter came home from all her travels yesterday. I was so happy to see her - I'd planned cookie making as a way of bonding when she got home, and the two of us made Thumbprint Cookies out of the wind eggs our chickens laid and homemade blackberry jam from the blackberries in our yard. The cookies are fabulously shortbread-y, not too sweet, so that the jam is a lovely counterpart to the pastry-like cookie part. We don't use nuts because of the Badb's orthodonture.

We were sitting on the couch enjoying cookies and milk when Badb announced "I'm writing a book!" She pulled a tablet from her suitcase and handed it to me. Her irregular printing covered two thirds of a single page and told the story of a little girl named "Lean," (pronounced "Lee Ann") who went first to Phoenix, then Washington D.C., then New York where she was obligated to walk everywhere or take the "sobway." Sometimes, she had to both walk and take the sobway. Then she went to camp, and then to South Carolina. Lean bemoaned the fact that she was never in one place long enough to feel settled, and as a result she was "egsosted."

I read the story, and as I was drying my cheeks, the Pirate read it. Both of us made that "Awwwww!" face at each other.

I was impressed both that my daughter had felt the need to journal at all, and then that she went right for the heart of the matter. Not a dry recounting of the facts and sights - anyone can write that kind of list. My daughter at the age of eight has already stripped away the actual events and gotten right to the place where the writer's value lies. She pulls her own hopes and miseries out of her viscera, pokes through them, and then smears them on paper so that we can all look at it and say "Yes. Inside, I'm like this too."

It's easy to entice children of any age into cookie making. They immediately see the value of it and will participate just for the promise of being able to eat cookies. Writing is a little different. How do you convince your child that her efforts, while not the classic third-grade "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" fare, are more fabulous, more noteworthy? Less chocolate chip with toffee bits and cream cheese frosting, more subtlely sweet shortbread with occasional tart blackberry nuggets? All I can do is continue to consume them with great relish and let her know that, even if nobody else likes them, they'll always be my favorite.

Garden of Earthly Dreams

When I was pregnant with Badb, my husband and I didn't want to know in advance what gender the baby would be, so we had to pick out both boy and girl names. We started out with Celeste and Julian. I wanted the boy's middle name to be Fox, and my husband didn't like Celeste as a first name. We settled on Athena Celeste for a girl, but hadn't quite fixed on a boy's name until well into my seventh month when I decided that it would be Hieronymus Fox. I can tell you two things: the first is that I have never seen a single episode of Buck Rogers and would have been mortified to know that I would be naming my child after a television character played by Gary Coleman. Luckily, I didn't find this out until well after my child's birth. Second, every single person I knew, without exception, expressed a fervent hope that my child would be a girl. Nobody liked the name Hieronymus but me.

Of course the most well known Hieronymus is Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the famous tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights. I myself probably own three or four copies of the painting in one form or another. Maybe I like Bosch because I feel a kindred spirit. His visions and my dreams agree in startling ways.

Last night, my husband and I were at something that used to be a high school. It was no longer used for such, but it was a public space now. We were hanging out by the lockers with about half a dozen other people wearing jeans and t-shirts and carrying manga comics. Everyone had wild, stand-up hair and their clothes and accessories were festooned with likenesses of animated characters.

My husband and his friends were deeply involved in watching the most recent installment of some favorite show, and one of our other friends leaned over and asked me if I'd like to go for a ride. I said I would, and we ended up seated on what looked like a giant cafeteria tray. We gently lowered ourselves into a rushing river...of pasta sauce. It was at least twenty yards wide, and although it bubbled and swirled around our tray, it wasn't hot. All I could think every time our little craft took on "water" and we were splashed was that I would have some intense stain removal to do later.

We came around a tiny isthmus - a little peninsula that held a children's playground, but the players weren't children. They were all animals dressed as children. Two things in rompers with pterodactyl-looking heads hung from the jungle gym as something that looked like the living version of the Montauk Monster walked underneath. The Montauk Monster looked like a large cat with white fur over very red skin and a beak that made it look like an Egyptian carving. The pterodactyl-heads were grabbing at it, biting at it with their larger, more ferocious-looking beaks while the monster stalked by unconcerned.

The playground was bordered by a cinderblock fence, and there was a javelina wearing overalls and a striped shirt somehow pinned to the fence a foot or two above the ground. It was squealing in distress, clawing at the wall with its hooves, rubbing itself bloody against the rough cinderblocks. My skin crawled at the sight of the suffering beast, but the current was taking us away from the scene.

When I woke up, I was thinking about my daughter. I don't think that it would have been so bad if she'd been a boy and have been named for the Dutch painter, who himself was named for Saint Jerome. But instead, she is named after the goddess of wisdom, and is living up to that promise instead. I can only hope that when she gets home, she'll have something wise to say about my dreams.

The Tiny Fan Club

I've been writing to Peaches at camp. They have something called "Bunk Notes" at camp. You send an email, and at dinnertime, the counselors print out the emails and hand them over to the campers with the other mail. I like it because I don't have to leave my house or find a stamp or envelope, and the lag is minimal.

In the first week, I wrote normal letters. "Daddy and I had enchiladas for dinner. The dogs miss you," that kind of thing. At the end of the first week, my older daughter came home from camp announcing that she had been nicknamed "Muffin" by the rest of camp. I'm not the mother of anyone named "Muffin." But if I have to be Muffin's mother, my daughter is going to receive letters from Muffin's mother. Here's a little sample:

My darling Muffin,

Daddy and I went to the theater last night and saw a lovely production of the new play "That One Guy Talked to That Other Guy For an Hour And a Half and Then We All Went Out For Drinks." I just love art that imitates life! Anyway, I saw Mrs. Wellman-Bryson down near the orchestra wearing something that looked like it was made out of meringue and spiderwebs. Honestly, one shouldn't appear in public wearing just whatever rubbed off on one while breezing through the kitchens!

Today has been hectic, hectic, hectic! The Prime Minister dropped in unannounced and asked me if I would be available to be the ambassador to one of those South American countries that begins with...S? R? I don't know. It's a letter of the alphabet, anyway. I said I wasn't terribly keen on moving to a country with spiders the size of briefcases, but he assured me that my impressions of South America were all wrong. So, when you get back, we're all moving to Paraguay. Brush up your Spanish, my darling!

In other news, your winter wardrobe has been solved! The gardeners came rushing into the house (through the FRONT DOOR, no less!) shouting that we were being invaded by bears. Daddy took his musket and took care of the brutes, and the short story is that you will have a lovely new bearskin coat for school this year. You'll look so rugged & rustic, my darling! Let us know if you're in the market for a coonskin cap to go with it. I'm sure we could arrange something.

Well, I should wrap this up. We're expecting the champagne truck to come rattling up any old minute with this month's delivery. We're doubling up this month because we're hosting the Duchess' 104th birthday celebration and you remember how that woman can pour the stuff down! I guess when you're that age, it doesn't matter whether you're asleep and drooling in your chair before dinner. People expect it of you.

Love to all, darling!! TA!

I was flattered to learn that all of camp was reading my letters daily. The woman who was the counselor of Peaches' cabin asked if I would continue to write to her, even while Peaches is out at Yosemite this coming week and won't be getting emails. I told her that of course I'd write. One must support one's fan base, after all.

Virtual Bank Line Notebook

Last night's dream will definitely be mined for all it's worth at some future point.

There had been a terrible plague. Only about half of the human population survived, and those that did mutated. But when I say "mutated," I mean like Spiderman mutation. Everyone was some kind of amazing atomic super ninja.

Now, of the super amazing atomic ninjas left on the earth, half were insane and half were sane. The insane ones were extremely paranoid and believed that everyone was trying to kill them, and they responded in kind to everyone they met. The sane ones were lovely people. The hard part was that you couldn't tell who was who by looking - everyone looked perfectly normal.

The plague was also sort of slow-acting. There were still people dying all the time. The illness made them waste away, toughening their skin and wasting their muscles so that they looked like mummies. Finally, the heart and lungs were too weak to support life and the victims died, usually in their beds, although sometimes they would fall down in the street. The bodies would already be so dessicated that they would just crumble to dust.

I was rifling just such a body for whatever might be in its pockets one day when a man walked up to me.

"Was it someone you knew?" he asked. He seemed calm and lucid, but that didn't mean anything.

"No." I went on digging in the pockets.

"Are you okay?"

I turned to him. He was handsome - medium height, curly brown hair, brown eyes. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and some kind of backpack.

"Sure. I'm fine. It just seemed a shame to let whatever he...she...whatever might be here go to waste."

"Ah, sure. Hey, do you know of a good place to sleep?"

I told him about a friend of mine who lived about a block away. She had a nice place and was open to letting friends squat there while looking for a decent house that hadn't been too damaged by looting. He told me that he had to go take care of some things and went walking off, promising to be back soon.

I skipped off toward my friend's house. We were in a residential neighborhood with ranch-style houses and big lawns. About half the yards were dead or overgrown. The rest had well-manicured lawns, some groomed with obsessive zeal - garden gnomes, pink flamingos, ornamental wrought iron, etc.

My friend's house had a nice lawn littered with beach balls and croquet implements. Inside, she always seemed to be eating sweet and sour chicken. I went in and asked her whether she had room. I mentioned that the person in need was a handsome man and she immediately assured me that she had plenty of space. Then she told me that it was getting dark out and I'd better go. I went out the door at a run, nervous about the gathering dark and worried that the stranger would get back before I did and think I'd abandoned him.

In the twilight I made an uncomfortable discovery. The well-trimmed hedges, the careful topiaries were almost all made of thorn bushes, specifically placed to grab the clothing of anyone foolish enough to pass too closely. I tried cutting through a yard that had a tableau made with mannequins. A male mannequin was on the ground while a female mannequin loomed over him with her foot poised over his neck. I bumped into the female, nearly knocking her over. From nowhere, a woman appeared and demanded to know why I was upsetting her "reenactment of the recent crimes."

I was temporarily speechless, but then she stalked to a brick pillar at one corner of the yard. She stepped off the grass and said "Would you like to see what I've made for my yard?" I was looking all over, trying to figure out how I was going to calmly edge out of her yard without her going all ninja all over me. Too late.

She pushed a button and from the edges of the yard, wrought iron fencing edged with spikes came shooting out of the ground as a latticework of laser beams patterned the grass at my feet. As it reached higher and higher, I could hear the faint hum of electricity crackling through it.

"Yes," she said. "It's electrified. And you are trapped. If you hold perfectly still, you might survive the night. However, if you move a millimeter, you are dead."

But I knew what to do. I *AM* magnetized after all. As long as I only touch in one spot, I'm okay. I grabbed the fence with one hand. Swinging as hard as I could, I flung my other arm upward and let go of my handhold just as my other hand grabbed onto another spot a few feet above. Between my flinging myself upward, one hand at a time, and the inexorable upward climb of the growing fence, I was soon about 30' above the ground. I flung myself over the spikes at the top and jumped down, landing lightly on my feet.

The woman, who only just realized that she had lost me, was yelling at me as I ran toward the rendezvous point.

And then I woke up.

Yeah, this'll be come a story at some point.