Am I the last person to hear about the Shake Weight? Have you all been alternating between laughing uproariously and imagining the slick, buff men using the Shake Weight together before they . . . um . . . .

I mean, seriously. Shake Weight, or gay porn?

 I signed up for a Scribd account awhile back, and I follow them on twitter, so after the third time I received a ping that they're having an agent contest, I thought I'd at least look into it.

Now Accepting Submissions for Scribd’s “Get Lit” Event at Litquake 2009, San Francisco

Scribd is inviting Bay Area-connected authors to submit original, unpublished writing for a chance to read at Scribd’s official “Get Lit” Litquake 2009 event and the opportunity to meet with a literary agent. A handful of selected writers will perform their work in front of a live Litquake audience and panel of prominent judges 

Sounds good, right? I thought about putting TSV in, just because it might turn into something, you never know, and if not, nothing lost, right? Then I read the official rules and got to the "release."  


Yeah, thanks--I'll be passing on this one.

 That is the number of words I wrote today.  Which is impressive, and amazing, and wonderful.

If only they had been for SPECIAL DELIVERY, the story I had designated as the WIP, and not SMALL TOWN BOY, the story I was going to tackle in November for NaNoWriMo.

So long as SD gets a major dump like this later and in something resembling a timely manner, I'm not going to complain.  Hell, I'm not going to complain even if it doesn't.  But now, even though my brain swears it has another 5k ready in the chute, I am going to put this off until tomorrow.  Or later.  Or whatever.

I guess I should be grateful to Anna and her six hour playdate buddy, who made this dream possible.  And Dan, whose patient listening on the couch as I tried to talk the thing out last night, started the whole thing.

Still.  SD, I do not wish to abandon you.  Please make arrangements with Will & Co to get your time in, too.

Good night.

 I've been trying all day to think of how to deal with the Prop 8 decision.  I tried not thinking about it.  I tried shrugging.  I tried suggesting Californians move to Iowa.  I tried cute, cheeky, cranky, and resigned, and none of them fit.  What's left is rather shapeless, feeling more like a hollow, sad hole than anything else.

I get that the decision was about a court's interpretation of the law, and that California law is a bit funky. I get that it isn't over.  I get that there's still fight to fight, and I get that someday this will just be a sad footnote in history, one that will eventually be corrected.  But right now it's just sad.

Sorry, California.  I wish I could wave a wand and make it better.  I will come to hug you in person soon.

Twice now I have dreamed that I am possessed by a demon, and I'm read to admit that my subconscious has successfully drawn my attention.

The other night was nice and metaphorical.  I dreamed of a room full of people, mostly those I knew, opening their chests (bloodlessly, thankfully) and delighting at the wonders they saw inside themselves.  They showed one another, then laughed and opened themselves again and again and again.  I stood in the corner, huddling and scared.  An angel came to me and asked me why I wasn't joining in with the others.  I hunched further over myself, shook my head, then spelled, in the air, "demin."  The misspelling was deliberate.  If I spelled it correctly, I feared I would call it out.

That dream I was willing to write off as a side affect of talk therapy. It made sense to me, so I considered it and what my possible demons could be, metaphorically of course.  I figured, too, that since I'd just finished editing and posting a big story full of demons and possession that this was an easy grab for the subconscious, and I left it at that. 

I dreamed of demons again last night, and now I'm just plain confused.  This time I was going to the chiropractor, the one I see in real life.  The office was dream-mangled, and the rooms were labyrinthine and dark.  I didn't notice, however, and arrived describing my neck pain to the doctor--this would be the neck pain that had been keeping me up all night and making my right hand fall asleep.  It's been, lately, worse than it's ever been, and it's irritating me.  I explained it to him, and he nodded, and led me back to some room in the back of the building.  Some assistant (who is not there in real life) came and made up a mattress on the floor, and he had me lie down.  I just lay there for a long time, and he spoke softly, of things I don't remember.  I was very tired, and I'd drifted back to that room, and now I lay there dazed and floating.  After several minutes, he spoke.

"Good.  I think you're safe now.  You went too close to a meteor there for a minute, and it tried to grab you."

I remember being puzzled.  Meteors?  Really?  This is a hazard?  How do you tell?  I wanted to ask the questions, but I was still tired and dizzy, so I just sort of frowned.  He did a few procedures, the particulars of which are lost to me in the fuzziness of the dream, but what I remember is looking at this dish-like thing where two little globby monsters appeared, one pink and one brown.  "These were inside you," he said.  I remember staring at them, disgusted and horrified.  I felt violated.  Those had been inside of me?  Where?  How?  Why?  And I still felt dizzy, so I worried there were more.

The dream deteriorated into complete rather than just partial nonsense at this point: they served me lunch on a dish I'd forgotten to rinse, I milled around the halls of my own home only to land back at the front desk, and there was just general stuff, nothing that strikes me or floats to the top.  But I keep thinking of those demons on the plate, the casualty of getting "too close to a meteor."  

You can't have my kind of imagination and take your dreams literally. You just can't.  But this is twice in the span of a week that my subconscious has identified that I am harboring alien particles.  I'm not sure what to do with this, frankly.  Get an MRI of the nerve cluster that affects that arm at C7/C8?  How?  Tell my doctor that I keep dreaming of demons living inside me?  There's no clue as to the chiropractor's procedure, either.  I just laid there on the mattress on the floor and was dazed.  And more importantly, I hadn't felt like that was all.  The dream ended with me in a confused panic.

I have no answers.  I'll probably play with runes and cards later this morning, because I'm That Way, but I don't expect to actually learn anything I can use.  I suppose the only thing to do is to keep listening to my subconscious, and maybe to drop an autowriting/journal note to my celestial steering company and let them know BY THE WAY, THAT DOESN'T INFORM ME AT ALL, ONLY SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME.  Well, and it also makes me want to go write.  But anything does that, to be honest, and that one they already know.

 In the past few days I have been visiting some new forums, and I've also been reading more comments on blogs and news posts.  I'm thinking now that I want to stop doing that, say, maybe, forever.

What keeps me going back is that I can't figure it out.  Are there more crazies per capita in these venues?  Do sane people simply appear crazy because they're taken out of context?  Are people in general crazier than I have been willing to admit?  

I don't know.  I've heard all about the no accountability culture, blah, blah, blah, and I think it's true to a point, but seriously. Is anyone actually satisfied by going on a forum, barfing all over everyone, then walking away?  Or is this some sort of psychotic hit and that's why they keep coming back?  Go insult someone, toss out some snark, and then feed the dog?  Is this Jekyl and Hyde--on the internet they're assholes, and then they go work for charity?

Don't know.  Don't know. Probably never will, either, but sadly, this will not keep me from wanting to.

So far I've only really had two in real life, though I suppose I have to count the third one I really wasn't going to count because I didn't think they'd been gone enough to really be ghost-like, but then I dreamed last night, and in that theater, this person did indeed count as a ghost.  The two I counted in real life were on facebook, and benign, and even welcome, so that's okay.  The third ghost-not-ghost wasn't bothering me until the dream, and basically this morning I'm wincing and groaning a little.  Damn subconscious.  Always so slow to get memos.

Though I'd like to write off all my dreams from last night, thank you.  They were even more annoying than the fact that my right hand is falling asleep again, though the improvement is that it's JUST the hand now, not the whole arm.  I am anticipating the chiropractor's excitement when I tell him this.  He's already in love with my shoulder in only a way a chiropractor can be.  But I digress.  The dream.

The ghost bit was just annoying, the same old same old, dreams from years ago come back like they'd never left, except, as I write this, I realize I've improved just slightly because while I knew I was the same, I worked very hard to not let anyone know, and the best part was I had this Team that went around with me, aiding and abetting, and there was never confrontation, and I never got hurt.  Except this was all happening on a beach, and when it was done, I told Dan I'd take Anna to the car and come pick him up.  Don't ask me why, but it worked in the dream.  

So I get the car, strap Anna in her seat (she's four in the dream), and I think, "I should lock the doors," and as soon as I think that, someone tries to get in the car. I get the back doors locked in time, but the front passenger seat fails to lock, and the guy gets in.

I am angry, angry, angry with my subconscious, because the man is black, and he is a thug.  I have a racist, stereotyped subconscious.  I am so disappointed.  I think he had to be black, though, because he had to be Other, because he was very smooth-talking, trying to convince me to let him kidnap me and my car and my kid, and I think I was unable to act because, retardedly, I didn't want to be racist.  Actually, this is all very good for therapy, where I am talking about being too nice, of providing false fronts where people then think they are my new best friend or can ask me do to, say, or be anything, and I am standing there hating them but can't speak about it because I am so heavily programmed that I can't be mean unless someone is being a horrible ass.  I still think it was dumb that he was black, though.  I can think of at least seven archetypes which wouldn't have been so gauche. But the key was that he was an invader, he was a threat, but he wasn't MEAN, just sleazy, so I couldn't fight him.

Anyway, the good news is that I got him out, dumping him in front of a bunch of other people who were doing the same thing, but they were in this mob, trying to get other people to buy their shit or take them somewhere or do other things they didn't want to do.  I'm not sure how it worked, but somehow he couldn't force me to do anything once I rolled down the window and they started in, and I got him out.  But then I wasn't in the place where Dan was going to meet me, and I couldn't stay because of the mob.  I started driving around in a busy city that reminded me of Chicago, needing to call him, but I couldn't get to my phone, and I wasn't sure he had his on.  (Very real life.) 

The weirdest part is that somehow I ended up going up a hill that was so steep it was practically sheer, and of all things, I was going up it now on a bike.  Anna was behind me on her trail-a-bike, no longer four but her actual age now, and she's nervous, but I tell her to just keep pedaling, just keep going, because we're almost there.  There's a guy beside us biking, as if to prove it can be done.  But it's SO steep, and soon the bike wheels start spinning against the pavement, unable to go.  The guy's tires do, too.  We're stuck.

I turn to look back down the hill, and I about throw up.  I can't go back down it on the bike.  I'll die.  But I can't go up, and for some reason walking is out.  I turn to the guy, looking at him in panic as I try to keep my voice light as I reassure Anna.  The guy points to the right, and we go onto this side street that looks like Iowa City, still a hill, and it's the wrong way, but it's not as impossible, and there are other people there.  I start up it.

Then I wake up.  And deliberately do not let myself go back to sleep so I don't dream again.

So, I don't know what this means.  Maybe it means nothing.  I guess at least the ghost didn't get me, and I didn't fall down the hill. 

Dan, start taking your goddamn phone with you.  Everywhere.  And make sure it's on.  And for the next month or so, you are WALKING ME to the car if we're ever in a busy area.

ETA: I was thinking about this as I drove Anna to school, and I realized that it wasn't the guy on the bike who suggested the turn-off, but me.  Somehow that seems important.

The other night I had another Neil Gaiman dream.  This time he was reviewing my writing, showing it to someone else, and he was very pleased with what I'd done, and was trying to explain it to the other person.  "Look," he said, holding out some pages.  "She's turned the sacred into the sacrisant." 

I've been meaning to look that up for days, and I finally did last night.  I found some references to some Catholic Church position, and then I found this.

 Today is apparently unfocus day.  I can seem to commit to nothing and have been stopping and starting things left and right, and getting none of the things done that I feel intellectually I should be doing.

Part of this is a preoccupation with my health, specifically the status of my muscles.  I've felt discomfort in my shoulders for well over a month, and in the past few days this has spread to my legs, feet, and glutes.  My hands have added themselves to the mix today.  I'm perplexed over it because it's not an ache like flu, not strain, and not soreness; more than anything, it's a tightness, and in an interesting twist, it improves when I exercise or use a menthol-like cream/rub/patch--it doesn't go away long term, but while my blood is pumping through, it's good.  My feet especially are often very cold, and sometimes my legs tingle.  What it feels like to me is that I am not circulating properly.  I don't know how to verify that, however, and I don't know what to do about it.

I will, eventually, head to the doctor, but right now they'd just give me a muscle relaxant, and I don't want one.  I'm going first to a new massage therapist (new to me, not new in practice) who apparently combines my regular LMT's practice with my energy therapist's techniques with some magic tricks of her own; she also sounds fantastically educated, and I'm very excited.  I will head to the traditional doctors if this and some renewed exercise regimens don't resolve it, but we'll see.

I just wish I had an exercise bike.  I have a treadmill, but our basement is too short and the treadmill stinks.  Will have to save my pennies.  I swear that would help.  God, if Christmas hadn't killed our savings . . . .

Anyway.  That is me.  Not getting anything done and aching in strange ways.  And the story muses have been successful in their evil work, because now I am chasing them, not them chasing me, which I know is the way they like it.

I am making Christmas cookies this weekend COME HELL OR HIGH WATER.  I just want this made perfectly clear.  

 Two thousand words on STB this afternoon.  What part of "take a break and relax" does my brain not understand?

It's very compulsive, this urge to get it down, probably stronger because I'm resisting it.  And it's seducing my inner editor, because it's new scenes, but they fit into bits of the old draft, pouring over it like some sort of molten thing that seeps into holes and eats away at anything that needed to go.  Vivid, too.

I assume this is because I was gleefully ready to leap back into Sam and Mick and their Kylie-happy love affair and penchant for kinky phone sex.  Will must have been tired of waiting and decided to hijack me before I could wade back in.  Well, all I have to say to him is that I have very high attachment to Christmas cookie making, tree-decorating, and lots of silly, sentimental Christmas things with my daughter and husband.  And he can keep his substance abuse to himself.  (He has, apparently, developed a Dunhill habit while I wasn't looking.  OH, WONDER WHERE THAT'S FROM.)

Of course, John has been redecorating, too, while I've been away.  And he has my attention, too.

I can't believe I can't even go twenty-four fricking hours.  I swear to God, I was trying!  I ate the chocolate and everything!  And I'm reading the books, and I'm knitting . . . .

But man alive, it's loud.  It's never been this loud.  

Huh.

 But the words are coming, so I don't care.  

Well, okay, I care.  It must be the new thing, post holy-shit-last-fall-what-the-fuck, whatever that whole thing did to my writing psyche, that I feel moderately dazed while I write, that it feels insane and all over.  But honestly, there is NO PLOT HERE.  Nada.  None.  It's nothing but nonsense, and so much of it is UTTER DRECK.  If Charles smiles one goddamn more time, I'm going to choke him.  I mean, the flan scene was great, but this is just weird.  

But they're sitting on a star, wondering who made them.  So it's hard to be too pissed off.

Also, talk about cast of four billion.  Holy hell.  Some of these people have to fold into one another.  Somehow.  

The music du jour, however, is Enigma.  Big props to youngdaniel  for saying, "Hey, you knew they had a new album this fall, right?"  because I didn't, and it is fabulous, and I have it now.  I have had an Enigma renaissance, in fact.  Aurel, though, has his own mix.  It's very epic and optimistic and full of hope, with little dark edges.  Right now I am in the middle of this huge sequence where it's he and Charles, talking and talking and talking.  And riding golden dragons to the stars.  (Dan, it was too good not to use.  But no lotus yet.)

It drives me nuts how the story contradicts itself, though.  One minute somebody knows something, then they don't, and then . . . I don't know. Crack.  This book is on meth, crack, speed, and it guzzles whiskey, too. With champagne chasers.

I just don't know.  It's so weird.  It feels like absolute nonsense, end to end.  And yet I keep showing up and birthing another set of three thousand words.

Okay, then.

 This is what I'm talking about.

Last night I dreamt that Dan, Anna, and I lived in a house that I think was supposed to be this one but looked nothing like it.  We had just moved in, but I was edgy about it.  I kept telling Dan there was something wrong with the house, or that something wasn't right, that I didn't feel right when I was in it.  I became obsessive about locking the doors.  At some point Anna just ceased to be there, as if she were a character that wasn't working, but I remembered her, and that began to bother me, too.  And in the dream, I was having dreams and visions.  I changed, too, from being myself into being an African-American woman, very tall and lithe with a sort of 70s 'fro going on.  And then I went to the bathroom, became myself again, and knew the something wrong was in the bathtub.  Dan came in, and I said, "There's something wrong," and he told me to calm down, and either left, or I left in the sense that I stopped focusing on his presence and just looked at the tub.  And that was when I heard the child, felt its presence.  I asked it to tell me what was wrong, and in answer, it made the dirty ring around the tub bleed.  "He did this to you?" I remember saying.  And the child didn't speak, but I knew that "he" had, whoever he was, and that he was coming back to make sure no one ever found out.

Then I woke up.

What is impressing me, or perhaps more appropriately, striking me, is that neither in the dream or upon waking am I upset.  I dreamt of a bleeding bathtub and my greatest thought is, "Yeah, I really need to clean mine.  It's getting gross."  In the dream itself, I was more focused on who the hell is going to be coming to my house rather than the fact that I could sense the presence of the dead and that a child had been murdered in my bathtub.  I also keep remembering the way that blood ran down the sides of the tub, starting at the ring.  I recall it on purpose, because it was such a striking image, and because it doesn't seem threatening, if you can believe it.

I don't usually remember these dreams, but I have them all the time.  I'm actually feeling a lot better for remembering this one.  None of them are ever recurrent, but I can tell you I'm usually battling something grisly in a dream.  Usually I am calmly kicking its ass.  Except for that one with Neil Gaiman shooting the dragon with the Easter egg.  God, I want that dream again.

Hotels and schools.  I'm always running through the hallways of hotels and schools, organizing the troops and preparing to to deadly battle with an invisible enemy, but I never have so much as a weapon.  It never seems to bother me, either.

I will say I had an overwhelming urge to listen to E.S. Posthumus this morning, though, to let their lovely symphonic sound even out all the dark, dripping blood.  And, as a point of interest, I have twice made sure all the doors were locked in the house.

At this moment we have a rather significant storm coming at us from the northeast.  In my nearly 36 years of existence in Iowa, this could possibly be a first.

In other news, I think I finally have my head on straight.  Almost.  Spent the day reading the opening salvo and chapter into Garage Band, listened to it, and think I have what I need to square it up.  Got a bit frenetic and took a walk around the park.  Wrote down what I think will work.  Then got rather edgy and a bit weepy because I really want to be done and yet I also want it to make sense.  Had a talking-to from Charles, and everyone who lives in my head said he was right.  No, I'm not above psychoanalysis from my characters, actually.

Anna has a playdate for a significant portion of tomorrow; I'm thinking of waking earlyish and working hard so that by the end of the day I can say that I Accomplished Much.  The goal right now is to have all of act one ship-shape by August 29.  I mean, REALLY ship-shape, all beta comments assimilated, all my own musings sorted, and the pacing vastly corrected.  Everything past that should be a lot more manageable, and there's a contest I want to try to prep something for in the meantime.  I really, really want to be submitting by mid-September.  I had originally intended another round of betas, but I think, actually, I may stick with where I am for the moment. I just want to do a round of submissions.  I'll feel so much better.  If it really, really sucks, then I'll find a wave two to help sort out the chaff of that.  But I want to submit so much I ache.  Signing would be lovely, but right now I just want to submit.

That sounds so sexual.

Anyway, off to watch this storm come in backwards.  Maybe the rain will come up from the ground and seep back into the clouds to go with the wrong-direction.  You never know.

I'm just going to preface this by telling you it's more than okay to laugh at this.  Go ahead and laugh UPROARIOUSLY.

So, the story goes like this: Kari and Stephen have a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, as I have said, and as a consequence they have a very nice alarm system to go with it.  Kari explained very, very carefully how it worked, and walked me through everything I needed to do to make it work should I leave the house.  She told me to shut the windows, put the collars on the dogs, to lock the doors, and how to prime the alarm.  She told me how long I had to get out of the house.  She told me not just the passwords but the OMG I FUCKED UP ALARM WENT OFF code words to get myself out of trouble should the security people call.  She wrote it all down, and it was all good.

I have not ventured out of the house in the past three days alone in part because I was a wee bit intimidated at all this, but today I finished a scene and was feeling cocky, so I wanted to cook them dinner.  They keep spoiling me ROTTEN so I wanted to go to the chic little grocery store down the street and get stuff for calzones.  So I put the collars on the dogs, got my lists, even took the list with all the passwords on so it wasn't in the house if somebody DID break in (I thought that part was really brilliant), got the keys, armed the alarm, and ran like hell out of the house, hurried through the locking procedure, and went to the store.  I had mapped it with google, and I drove very carefully and politely, but not too politely because that I figured would be worse in LA.  I made it to the store, and back, and even found a mailbox on the way to mail the things I needed to mail.  I am BRILLIANT, I am thinking!

Then I get back to their house.

I am greeted by a woman who has been walking past the house and who tells me the alarm inside is going off.  FUCK, I thought, but I didn't hear the alarm, so I'm thinking it was okay.  She wished me luck and kept walking.  I go in, and yeah, the thing is beeping, but just BEEPING.  So, I think I'm okay.  I hit in the code. 

It beeps at me.  It doesn't look appeased.

I put in the code again.

More beeping.

I panic and hit CANCEL. 

It makes a bunch of beeps, then seems to stop.  Good, I think, just a little rattled, thinking, that was a near miss.  I head to the kitchen.

I see the open windows.

That, I realized, was my mistake.  If you don't shut the windows that are on the sensor, the alarm doesn't like it.  Clearly I hadn't set the alarm.  Well, shit.  I also realized I'd forgotten to lock the back door.  Double shit.  Well, live and learn, I told myself.  Next time I will shut windows and check all doors and put the collars on the dogs and do everything right.  I begin to put things away in the kitchen.

The phone begins to ring.

I answer it, thinking it might be the security people, and I'm going to tell them that I know the passwords and not to worry.  But no, it is Stephen's brother.  The security people have called him.  We have a nice chat, I apologize for making a fuss, then we hang up and I start to compose an email to Kari saying, "Hey, that was me, if you got a call."

Then the phone rings again.  This time it is Kari's mother.  I tell her the same thing as I told Stephen's brother, but then Kari's mother adds, "You need to call the police, because they're coming over!"

FUCK.

Now I'm a bit shaky.  I try to call Kari, but it says all circuits are busy.  So I google the police.  Their circuits are not busy, and they are very nice, but then they tell me that the address I am giving them is not in their town.  "But this is their mailing address!" I say, starting to panic.  "And some police are coming!"  She insists this house and street are not in this town, and wishes me luck.

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK.

In the middle of that my cell phone had rung, and I'd sort of tried to answer it, realized I can't talk to the police and then someone else at the same time, so I hung up.  It was Kari.  I called her back, and she tells me Stephen is on hold from the security people, but if the police show up to be nice.  But not to reach for things in my pockets.  At this point I am laughing but also thinking hard about the Scotch in the cupboard and the leftover cigarettes in the den.  But then also thinking maybe I should wait on that until the police are NOT here.

Jesus H.

Anyway, I really am laughing, except for when I'm shaking, and I already started on the Scotch.  I promise to blog from the pokey.

ETA: Wait, there's no internet in the pokey.  Well, it's been a good run.  Send cake.

I guess we're not done with the mental retardation that was Serenity, then?

Whedon, get therapy.

Do not drink. Do not eat. Do nothing while watching this video, and get tissues for your eyes, and possibly a pillow to stifle your laughter.

It's not just a metaphor gone horribly, horribly wrong. It's . . . . it's an electrocuted pickle for God.

I am awed, though I have to say, not really ready to jump back in the Lutheran boat.




(via Boing Boing)