When Opportunity Knocks, Put on Your Bathrobe and Open the Door

This happens to me more than I'd like to admit: I'm in bed, just falling asleep. As my brain comes unmoored from reality and starts to float away for the night, images come to me. Sometimes they're amorphous, conceptual images that dissolve like fog in sunshine the deeper into sleep I fall. But at times like last night, they just become more and more concrete.

Two years ago, I took a bunch of the really vivid military battle-tech dreams I had and put them together into a novel. It didn't work. Really, really didn't work. Last night as I was falling asleep, it all fell into place. The key to the whole thing was a dream I had Saturday night (which did not make it in to the Virtual Bank Line) and the correct title. (R&D: Rule & Dominion)

I ended up turning the light back on, sitting up and writing all the salient points down in one of my many journals. I was so pleased at how it had just all come together so perfectly and ended by being so hyped up that after I had written it all down, I had to spend half an hour reading P.G. Wodehouse before I could drop back to sleep.

Oddly enough, I ended by waking up extra early this morning and having a good day. Go figure!

Virtual Bank Line de los Muertos

I was at my parents' house, housesitting. They're due back any minute, and I really have to get weaving on picking up, etc. My parents' house is remarkably unlike real life. In real life their house is decidedly Spanish colonial - chunky wood, leather and tiles everywhere. In my dream, everything was 70s futuristic with black and white plastic and bold geometric shapes.

My parents arrived with my girls in tow and I was forced to sit and look at pictures. There were quite a few taken at night at some kind of party that included tons of dia de meurtos paper skeleton cutouts. I asked about them and was told that they had done a midnight tour of the Palacio Blanco - the White Palace. Everyone (in my dreams) knows that the White Palace is a place where ghosts gather and go dancing every night. I know that, but up until now I couldn't have said what those ghosts look like. I ask if it was at all scary, and my stepmother replied that it was horrifying, although she said it such a noncommital way that I really had a hard time believing it. It was the same tone of voice my kids use when asked "How was your day?" And they shrug and reply "Eh. Fine." "It was horrifying." My daughters couldn't even be bothered to look up from what they were doing as my stepmother talked about it.

I looked closely at the pictures, and I was suddenly inside one of them. Palacio Blanco is on an open plain with cyprus trees lining the walkway that leads from the driveway to the main hall. The trees alternate with benches and I'm sitting on the bench closest to the driveway. Cinderella-style carriages pulled by skeletal horses wearing plumes on their harnesses drive up and disgorge skeleton homres y mujeres dressed in their dancing clothes. But the carriages, horses and people aren't the matte white of paper, nor are they practically two-dimensional. Instead, it looks as though they're made from sheets of sugar - about half an inch thick and glittering in the moonlight. Because they're like cutouts, they're exactly the same from the front as from the back, and as they walk to the hall, they carry on conversations with people behind them as easily as with those in front.

It wasn't completely horrifying, nor was it a non-event. I was riveted. I was captivated. It was beautiful. My dreams are trying to tell me that the season of the dead is starting, and I can hardly wait!

PFC Virtual Bank Line reporting for duty SIR!

At the very tail end of last night's dream, I was going on a business trip to Reno. Not surprising, considering that much of my team is in Reno and yesterday I was thinking about having to go in the next couple of weeks.

I got off the plane and was herded onto a train that let me off in a giant station filled with formations of people marching purposefully here and there. I took an escalator up to an observation deck that looked out on a practice yard. Down below were two men, one of whom was holding something that looked like a polearm, except that it had a huge sort of sharpened claw-looking thing on one end, and a big, curved blade at the other. The man against whom he was fighting wore armor that looked like horizontal sheets of glass held in place with rods. The glass kept the polearm from contacting the man's skin, but he was careful nonetheless.

I went into a room for a meeting with my boss, who was giving me my annual review. The result of my review was that I was being promoted to Lieutenant, and my next duty assignment was learning our company's policies and procedures in Italian.

I'm still a little confused.

Musical Chapters

I've been writing this book for, no joke, about five years. This is the third or fourth iteration, and it's coming back to the spirit of what it was when I first wrote it.

Every time I "fix" it, I end up moving the chapters around. This has made it horrendous for my alpha readers, who receive a new copy and start reading it and marking it up with comments like "Why is this the first time we've heard the name of this town?" when what they're reading is something like the third paragraph of the first chapter, it's just that when they received it, it was actually the third paragraph of the FOURTH chapter, and I took out all the earlier references to the cat.

I'm eternally grateful to my alpha readers, but I have to admit that it's a little taxing to sift through the comments and having to stop and think about whether this or that nitpick is still even relevant. I wish there was a way to instantly and automatically reflow the copies of everyone who's reading it, as I'm updating things.

But there's not. I'm currently working in Storyist, a novel- and screenplay writing software for the Mac. It's got some cool features, like the ability to drag pictures onto your character sheets and then have those character sheets sitting at the edge of your screen so that you can keep track of your characters. It formats everything for you and displays your chapters, sections, etc., in a column on the left. This means that it's already indexed once you're done and you don't have to do anything fancy to be able to move quickly from this part of the book to the next. It exports to Word or .pdf, too. Yay.

Until there's instantaneous transmission, I'll just gratefully wade through the comments and be happy that someone's willing to read my drivel before it's done.

Virtual Bank Line Celebrity Cameo

Last night I was taking the Badb to her father's house, which involved getting in a truck and driving over what looked like the landscape from the beginning of The Chronicles of Riddick where Vin Diesel is running over the frozen planet. It's like a fingerprint magnified a million times into a series of giant ridges. And I was driving on one of them.

I'm sure there's a word for when it's alternately raining and snowing, and the ground is covered in half-frozen slush, but coming from Arizona, I don't know what that word is. I just know that I was driving my pig of a truck through it and I couldn't concentrate. My gaze kept drifting to the back seat where Badb was sleeping, out the passenger window to check out the scenery, anywhere but on the road in front of me. More than once, I nearly drove off the road, off a cliff, and into a deep ravine.

We got to the Badb's father's house, but it wasn't his house. He was living there with his father. It was two in the morning when we arrived, and everyone in the house was up. I think it was because someone had just had a baby, but it wasn't someone related to the family. I started introducing everyone to my friend, Jim Carrey, but got annoyed that nobody seemed to recognize him. The funnier part of that was that Jim Carrey didn't even seem to notice that nobody gave him a second glance.

Then I had to move my truck out, but it was tricky because there were evil men that I was trying to escape. I went back into the house, but the house had turned into something like a convent and the nuns were hiding me from a man who looked like the movie portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, but who was sputtering to me about The Lord of Sweatpants.

Luckily, I woke up soon after that.

Capturing the Essence of Fhtagn

I'm working every spare second I have to finish the piece I'm writing now. It's coming along as quickly as can be expected, and I have every expectation that I'll be done in the three weeks I have.

What's next? Well, my next project centers around the Cthulhu mythos. I knew NOTHING of the entire body of work before conceiving of the project, so I did a little research on the right folks to read (besides the obvious, I mean) and then bought some books.

I'm about halfway through the first collection, and I think I've already boiled the body of work down to its essential tripes:

- non-Euclidean geometry that makes things either hard to see or nausea-inducing
- stuff so old that even the slime on it is older than the oldest thing that was old when the world was born
- things that are evil because they are outside of human morality
- using the word "obscene" to describe things that do not necessarily outrage one's sense of moral decency
- outrageous ignorant bigotry
- exotic, yet not necessarily attractive locations
- really big monsters from space

Man, I can hardly wait to get this baby started!

Moving Through Tumult

I flog myself constantly for not doing as much writing as many of my other writer friends. They all write a novel a week, and here I am still working on the same one that I've been working on for months and months. Sure, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

But in the last two months, my life has had some pretty major upheaval. My household swelled to 7 and has now shrunk to 5 and looks to be holding steady. School has started. I have been the only person in my 3-person department for an entire month. And through all this, I've been chipping away at this monster. A little at a time.

I'm excited. The part of the novel that I was really worried about is really coming together, and I think that it's not only going to work, but it's going to work better than I had imagined.

And, I have my NEXT evil project planned out already.