Giving Birth to What?

I've had an amazing active dream life the past six weeks. I am sleeping later and dreaming more, much more. With the darker days I don't wake up until it's really light outside, and in the hour before waking the dreams come.

Last night for the third time in as many weeks, I dreamed about having babies. In one dream I was pregnant, (gaaaa!) and in the other dreams close friends had new babies. One look like a withered root of a child but this morning the friend's baby was perfect and beautiful. When I asked who the father was, she said he was an artist. Hmmm. I wish I knew what these dreams meant.

In another dream, I was in a room full of women writers and someone was announcing whose short stories would be published. Happy squeals of delight, but one other woman and I were not in the elite group. Someone mouthed the cliche, "Keep trying. Don't give up." What a downer. I was devasted.

The dream that started off this series, no, it was a nightmare was a common thread, along the lines of "the final exam is tomorrow and I haven't been to class or read the material." This dream was "we are in Singapore and the plane leaves in an hour and a half and we haven't started to pack." Worse, we had acquired huge boxes of toys, big sets of legos and Fisher Price toys that had to be crammed into unwieldy suitcases. A true nightmare.

What does it all mean? she asked.

I'm all set for Miss Snark's Crapometer tonight. Ready, set, submit.

And finally, finally, the word count of Festival Madness is growing. I've written two scenes and now the Fun Stuff of the INCREDIBLE AND EXCITING FINALE can be addressed. There's been a lot of set up to get to this point, the whole book in fact. It's exciting and intimidating, but I can do it. Whether this book will have more appeal than the others, I don't know. The Wisconsin book seemed like a winner and my writing group was so gung ho and so far one agent loved it, but he doesn't represent that genre, and the agent he passed it on to said it didn't quite work for her. No other feedback. But she obviously liked the writing because she requested the first three chapters of World of Mirrors.

Now the writing group is gung go about World of Mirrors. I read them the prologue and the new beginning and they want to hear the whole thing. Said it sounds much smoother and more polished. Well, I've only rewritten it about 10 times. Knocked 18,000 words out. 18,000 useless words. The current wisdom is that you have to write at least 500,000 words before you'll become a "good" writer. I sure as hell have more than that.

So, now it's time to wrap and bake. Tomorrow night we're going to the Christmas Revels in Sanders Auditorium. I am as eager as a kid to see Santa.

Maybe someone will give me the Interpretation of Dreams for Christmas.

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