Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Drinian, who turned out to be my friend Heathah's younger brother N: Now is the time in the dream when we have to build a Dawn Treader!
Me: The time on Sprockets?
Drinian/N: [eyebrow]
Me: Seriously, a Dawn Treader? They're generic now?
Drinian/N: Look, if you didn't want to spend some of your dreams building boats, you should have gotten your mythic-emotional resonances with a less seafaring people.
Me: ...fair enough.

[We commence the building of the boat.]

I dreamed that someone had embroidered for me a little long, narrow motto in a wooden frame for above the door to my office. It said, "Never give up. Never surrender." And it had the Galaxy Quest ships picked out in cross-stitch and outlining stitches.

If anybody really is good at that sort of thing, which isn't likely and we didn't expect it, my birthday is July 26.

Gahh, what an unpleasant night. I woke up at 3:15 with the sense that something had gone horribly wrong. Ahh, postcognition! You know, the superpower where you know stuff has happened after it does and you witness it and people talk to you about it? Yah, great superpower there. I could maybe deal with being awakened in the night by a precognitive event, especially if it was a specific one. If I woke up at 3:15 a.m. thinking, "Must--stop--godfather--from taking the 101 to work--", and I had some reason to think that a) he does and b) something bad would actually happen and I could stop it, y'know, that'd be worth it. Text godfather, go back to sleep. But postcognition, no. Waking up with the sense that my grandfather has died, some of my other favorite people in the world have some really serious problems, and I've had debilitating vertigo for nearly two years--yah, thanks, brain, I think that revelation could actually have waited for morning. Actual morning. Which 3:15 is not despite the phrase "3:15 in the morning," which is more commonly pronounced, "3 $&%#@* 15 in the #$%&$*@ morning."

Which is why I was propped in the corner of the kitchen counters so I could rub the skin off previously-toasted hazelnuts at 4 a.m. without falling over. Because what else are you going to do at 4 a.m.? I mean, really. It's not like I had enough brain at that hour to think, "Oh, I'll just work on this story, then," and doing finger exercises on the piano was right out, and if I was too dizzy to sleep, I was too dizzy to deal with hot things, and therefore no baking at 4 a.m. for me.

I did eventually get back to sleep by the expedient of propping two of the (rather large) sofa pillows under my knees so that I could have dreams of being safely strapped in on a malfunctioning space station rather than bouncing around free like I usually am on malfunctioning space stations. This is good to know. Safely strapped in is way better. But if I am frankly not at my best today, you may blame postcognition and vertigo. Dammit.

Okay, brain, REAL SUBTLE. I mostly don't like zombies in my fiction. (buymeaclue and cmpriest, this does not mean you.) Turns out I'm not all that keen on them in my dreams, either. But giving me for my only weapon...the lap desk I sometimes write on? Come on. Either get more subtle and complicated (and thereby INTERESTING), or hand me a dream note with the intended message on it and move along to something with a rhinoceros and a gazebo.

Last night as I was going to sleep it felt like my brain was pushing through snowy pine branches.

I woke up feeling pretty sure that there's a lamppost coming up one of these days.

1. All right, livejournalers: what does it mean if you dream that monkeys of various quite distinct types were gnawing on your hands all night? I need your theories!

2. I am heading off to Convivial this afternoon. I seem to have a manageable number of things to do in the meantime. I don't think this is going to be one of those conventions when I disappear from the face of the internet until Sunday, but on the other hand it'd be nice if I spent the time at it doing things other than reading lj and writing e-mail, so -- some sort of middle ground there, I guess.

3. As good as garden tomatoes are in season, sometimes they are just that bad out of it. Most of the grocery store tomatoes one gets that are really bad are more in the direction of, "Are you sure this is food instead of damp red styrofoam?" than in the direction of, "Ick ack what smells like that oh Lordy it's the tomato." (I had originally put the actual smell comparison in place of "that" in the last sentence. I went back and removed it. You may thank me. Vivid similes are a double-edged sword.)

4. I don't go around telling salespeople that I know exactly what their job is like because I sell stories, and that's selling things. I don't tell programmers that I know all about their work because I use a computer. I do not, in fact, accost the mailman to tell him I know all about his job because I put stamps on things. So please do not tell me that you "totally get" what writing fiction is all about because you have a cousin who writes grant proposals -- well -- she wrote one grant proposal, once. This does not make me feel warm and fuzzy and understood. It makes me feel like you are an idiot. Because you are, if you do this.

5. The more history I read, the more I believe that if you say, "Nobody in [large demographic group] was doing anything interesting then," you are wrong and speaking from ignorance. Primates get bored easily, and while some of them remain boring, a large enough cross-section of them will turn out people making up art forms and crafts, gadgets, discoveries, social/political/religious movements, etc. etc. etc. out of whatever little they have. So anyone claiming that the interesting stories in the fantasy world they're writing about are with one demographic group -- well, they have created something utterly unlike any human society. Take the most repressive society and the most repressed group in it, and I guarantee you they will have some kind of underground culture, secret signals, politics among themselves and between them and the larger group. They will be Up To Something. Because, y'know, monkeys: we're like that. You don't have to write about every group in every society -- you can't. Fiction is particular. But an awareness that there never was and likely never will be a human society with only one interesting demographic would be welcome in some fabulists. For heaven's sake, not only are the high nobility not the only interesting demographic in feudalism, actual feudalism relies upon the fact that they aren't!

I don't even really want to link to the discussion that got me thinking along these lines, because I think that the person whose work sparked the discussion is definitely and completely not making the "only one interesting demographic" mistake, and I very much do not want to associated it with that person's name even subconsciously.

You know those nights when you dream you're Mac from Veronica Mars and you have to hack a bunch of amusement park rides' control systems while riding them in order to keep evil stage magicians from killing everybody, and you wake up exhausted and convinced that it was your brain's way of dealing with the vertigo sensations?

No?

Never mind, then.

Okay, so I expect weird dreams when I'm sick, even when most of the fever is gone.

But I just got out my Finnish-English dictionary and discovered that what they were singing/chanting in my dream, over and over again, was, "Where is Väinämöinen? Who will be our Väinämöinen?"

With drumming.

So that was pretty creepy.

(Luckily, I'm used to picking up bits of languages without knowing I'm doing it, so my brain producing coherent Finnish sentences was not that creepy even though I don't speak Finnish. I really think the drumming was unnecessary, though. And the wailing.)

Two rejections, one of which was a policy change to no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts.

yhlee took a writing survey which included the question of what you would write if you were the writer you wanted to be. I don't think it works that way; if it does, I'll never find out. I don't know how else to become the writer you want to be except by writing the things you really want to write. I don't think that always works, it's just that I don't know what else does. I've known some people who needed to write things they thought of as "practice" or "not serious" or "not real," but most of the people I know who've done well with that have written things they thought were fun or interesting.

This is the life you get, and you don't know how much more of it you get. Waiting until you're perfect, or even some nebulous "better," is not going to make it the life you want. Don't wait until you're skinny to wear pretty clothes. Don't wait until you're no longer nervous to ask that special person out. And don't wait until you're your own ideal writer to write the story that has wrapped itself around your heart and head. You'll never learn to do it justice but by trying.

Central Iowa was extremely dusty yesterday. Not dry -- the creeks and all were plenty full. Just dry. Also our car CD player attempted to eat one of our CDs, but we thwarted it with judicious application of my knife. Why I Carry A Multitool, Instance 476.

I'm pretty sure that since this is lj, "does this happen to anyone else?" is going to be yes here, but we'll give it a shot: sometimes I fall asleep after reading something and dream that I'm still reading it. Does this happen to anyone else? The style stays constant -- apparently my brain can either produce the correct style on command or the illusion thereof -- but the plot often veers wildly off into a different direction completely -- from truepenny into Agatha Christie, for example, or from David Brin into Connie Willis, or from Patrick O'Brian into Isaac Asimov. This is disconcerting, particularly when I wake up and try to go back to where I was reading before: wait, is this before the butler killed Bernard? Have the dolphins started running madly around the corridors yet? Has the Zeroth Law of Naval Battles been discovered, or is that a few pages on?

On second thought, maybe this is just me.

In my dream last night, careswen was very sick, and she was screaming and screaming. When I scream in my dreams, it comes out like a kitten mewling. Apparently the same restriction does not extend to careswen.

You know what, brain? I don't actually have to worry about everybody I know, some of them for made-up dream reasons. I could just worry about the people who have worrisome stuff going on right now. Heaven knows they're numerous enough.

We're in a "no news is good news...or at least not the worst possible news" stage right now with some of our family. Waiting waiting waiting. And also waiting.