The trouble with dreams

When I got home last night, Bob had dinner almost ready for me--cream of mushroom soup (the expensive kind, not Campbell's), a grilled cheese sandwich, saltines, a dill pickle, and potato chips. And a Margarita at least twice as strong as I usually make for myself. It was wonderful to sit down and eat dinner without having to cook it; he went away somewhere to watch television and let me eat alone in the dining room with a book to decompress from the day.

At about 8:30 he called me upstairs for something--I forget now what--and I ended up lying on the bed with Dinah. Bob said, "Why don't you just go to bed?" and I said I couldn't, it was only 8:30 . . . I fell asleep, of course, and didn't wake up until some time around midnight when he came in and encouraged me to get undressed and get under the covers. He laughed at me this morning, but I'm just so unused to drinking any more that one drink just knocks me out.

One good thing about going to bed early, though: I remember a lot more of my dreams. Or maybe it was the alcohol, who knows? Anyway, I had this long, convoluted dream about being shipwrecked, of all things, and then ending up in a house full of archeological finds that belonged to a pair of professors who lived in the house. There was more to the dream, but by the time I sat down to write it out this morning, it was gone. That's the trouble with dreams.

Speaking of dreams, I've done something that alternately seems exciting and crazy. I've signed up for NaNoWriMo, the write-a-novel-in-a-month thing. I abandoned the one I was doing last year; I got bored with it, and just sort of lost momentum. And I didn't like a lot of what I'd done, but couldn't bear to actually just start over.

But that's what I'm doing, starting November 1.

I'm going to try to write a 50,000 (admittedly short) novel in a month. I'm not going to beat myself up about it if I can't do it, but I'm going to give it a good try. I made a personal weblog last year to collect research, so I'm making that public now, and while I haven't totally decided yet, I'll probably put up each installment as I finish it. What's the use of writing a bad novel if you can't share it with the world, right? The weblog (and the novel) is called Fallen Angel, and there's a link to it over in the left-hand column.

The whole point of NaNoWriMo is that most people who want to write say that they'll do it "some day," i.e., some day when I have more time, some day when the kids are grown, some day when my job is less demanding, etc., but that day never comes. You just have to force yourself to do it, and forcing yourself to write a novel in a month doesn't give you any time to worry about it, you just have to buckle down and do it, and not worry about making it perfect. It's all about the word count.

I actually thought about just figuring out how many words I'd have to write in a day and making myself write a journal entry of that length every day, then stick them together, but that seemed sort of like cheating . . .