am i dreaming?

Yesterday morning, S asked me if I'd had bad dreams the night before. I said, "No; why, was I making noises?" He laughed and said that several of his Facebook friends reported having bad dreams. I guess he was trying to see how far reaching this plague was. He had taken Nyquil, so he slept drugged and dreamless for nine hours.

Last night, I was startled by a bad dream. It was a bad dream, but I couldn't say that's what it was while it was happening. Usually, a bad dream is all about the label "bad dream." One could be being chased by an ice cream truck or a goat in a tuxedo, and that could be considered a bad dream, and somewhere in the middle of it, you know it. (I've had both of those dreams, and they were bad!)

In my dream that is just now coming back to me, I was climbing to the widow's peak of an old wooden house. There was a beautiful woman in a long white night gown standing next to me at the top. She stood up on the edge of the roof line and took a nose dive into the misty green silence before us. A moment later, I looked over the edge, and she had surely splatted on the concrete far below. It was startling. I thought, "Oh my god, she's dead." And then I woke up and thought it was a bad omen to have someone die in a dream (though I'm not superstitious that way, I myself have died in my dreams numerous times).

Then I thought back on the dreams S reported (and that I saw) on Facebook; one person had dreamt a close acquaintance died.

But I also remember passing by two empty public pools in the previous day or so and having a weird non-fantasy visualization of climbing up on the diving board and doing a dive into the emptiness. The part that stuck with me was that it might not kill a person to dive into an empty pool; it could just paralyze them, and as P1 says, that would be worse than death.

Just past the pool around which I had that thought, my eyes caught the eyes of an elderly black woman at a bus stop. I smiled, but it was too late to see if she smiled back. I like to think she did. A few days before that, I was riding my bike through that same neighborhood and caught a long glance at a black woman dressed in church-going finery. I nodded my head and said hello, and she smiled and said hello back. She was the opposite of the woman in white who dove to her death in my dream.

Maybe I'm making connections where they don't belong, but I fell in love with that black woman a little bit, even though I'm pretty sure that was the best our relationship could ever have been.

(photo credit)

it's not a nipple, it's a butthole

And now I'm home again. I went out for dinner and to write. My first choice was Mandola's Italian in the Triangle not far from here. The food is good, but what I really like is the atmosphere; well-lit outdoor tables and good people watching. But the line was out the door and I was starving so I drove over to Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin Blvd, which is what Sixth Street turns into at MOPAC. There was a wait there as well, but I pulled out my big cumbersome novel, removed the writing tablet from the inside pocket of the three-ring binder, found out what I needed to work on next, and dove into it.

This isn't writing, this is rewriting, revising or whatever. Whatever you call it, I haven't been doing much of it lately, so it felt good to get to it. For some reason, this part of the process feels less satisfying. The fuller versions, I would write a chapter at a time, for the most part; it was easier to get into the groove than it is when I'm just reworking a paragraph or two, or adding dialogue to a scene, which seems to be more often than taking dialogue out. I guess when things are cut down, whole chunks are usually pulled out, dialogue, narrative and all.

My first few attempts at rewriting were frustrating. I didn't think I was saying what I wanted to say, or felt like a lot more needed to be written, or that I didn't know how to get to the end of what I was writing and reconnect it with the existing manuscript. I read a couple of these to S, just to point out my frustration and illustrate my failure, and he liked what I had written. In the case that I couldn't find the end, he suggested I leave off the last partial sentence and leave it at that. He was right; it worked!

We joke that I'm writing this book for him. But he is my audience. He's a super-smart person, and knows me and my work better than anybody ever could, since we've had such a long acquaintance and because we've worked together creatively for a big chunk of those years. He's my first editor; these are his changes, for the most part, that I'm making before I consider the novel done and start the even more thankless job of looking for an agent or a publisher.

A few other people have also read the first draft. My mother is one of them. But I think she might have abandoned the project. She read the first chapter online, requested more (which meant I just had to tell her what buttons to push to get to the other chapters), and then asked if I minded if she printed it out, so she wouldn't have to sit in front of the computer the whole time. I gave her a copy. I visited there a month or so ago. It was an interesting visit. Not too traumatizing. But anyway, things get a lot more graphic by chapter four.

Another person who read (or is reading - she hasn't reported on her progress lately) is my old improv teacher. She had my favorite thing to say about the novel: It's not a nipple, it's a butthole! Perfect. She was referring to the graphic nature of my writing. My friend P1's then-boyfriend read it and sent me an amazing, descriptive, well thought out and useful critique by email. Ultimately, I didn't take his overriding suggestion - which was to change the more intimate details - but I did take a pause, as I have more than once over this, before proceeding. S was a big part of the decision not to change the content. A childhood friend of his, who is now a long-time friend of mine, is an editor and and she read it and had a similar reaction as P1's boyfriend did. She said up front that she has a hard time with graphic sexual content; I think the description of semen was particularly noted.

A lot of my writing of the novel took place at a time in my life when I was watching a lot of movies. Sometimes I would start writing late in the evening after watching a movie that inspired me. The inspiration totally fed into the august chagrin storyline; not that I stole anything from the movie, just that the inspiration that created the movie charged the inspiration that was creating the novel.

I have the hardest time explaining the channeling thing. P1 seemed to think I wasn't giving myself enough credit. But that's not what it's about. This is what I love about writing, tapping into a part of my brain that works on this completely different plane; it's there but isn't always reachable. It comes in its own time. Of course, putting myself in the proper situation to let that part of my brain work - a well-lit outdoor table at a nearby Italian restaurant perhaps - has a lot to do with it too.

I think I would have spent more time at Mandola's writing; I felt a little rushed and distracted at Magnolia. But I am happy with what I got written. It's still longhand, but I think it's going in the right direction. I just have to type it up.