Hitting the Snooze Bar on Brilliance

I take my dreams very seriously. I keep a notepad by the bed so I can write things down that I come up with in my dreams. I came up with the premise for my novel in a dream more than a year ago, and I got up and started writing it.

The other night I had a great idea for a title for the book. It was great. It burst into my head and woke me up from a deep sleep. I groped for the notepad in the dark. It wasn’t there. I lied in the dark and debated on whether I wanted to get out of bed, and out of the snuggly warmth of the bed. I dreaded the cold house around me as I went downstairs to get another note pad. I imagined the cold of the wood floors, as I left my slippers downstairs.

“Nah, I’ll remember it,” I told myself. “It’s a great idea, I’ll totally remember it.” I rolled over and dozed off.

I woke up in the morning, empty. The idea was gone. Vanished. Vaporized. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t reproduce it.

I mentioned it to Todd the next morning, hoping that he would say “Oh yeah, you were saying something in your sleep. It was blah blah blah blah…” No dice.

Instead he said “You always think that the ideas you dream about are brilliant. I’ll bet it was really something like ‘Concrete Bananas’ though. Then when you get up in the morning and look at your notepad you’ll say ‘What? I thought that was brilliant?’”

Notepad has been restored in its rightful place by the bed. Hopefully it’ll come to me.

Dry Spell

I used to write songs. Whenever I was particularly moved by something (usually when a guy broke up with me) I’d pull out the guitar and write some gut-wrenching tune that I would brokenheartedly howl along to. I’d perfect the song then play it at the open mike night, or whenever I’d play an actual show, and watch the people in the front row wince as I crowed about some injustice that some loser boyfriend committed against me. I went through periods of cranking out songs (and blowing through bad boyfriends) and then I’d hit a dry spell, otherwise known as contentment.

During my song writing dry spells I would write about my inability to write about something that moved me. For example, a song I wrote in 1996 started with “I’m only writing this song in this key because I know you like these chords…” And later on, in 2003 when I wrote our wedding song as a surprise for Todd it started with “I tried to write you a sappy love song, complete with poetry and riddles and rhymes. But the way I feel there’s too much to say, I couldn’t write it all down on time…”

I remember reading the liner notes from the Deborah Conway CD "Bitch Epic." She said that she had composed most of the songs on the CD by filling a hat with slips of paper that had random words on them. She would draw the slips of paper out and try to write something using the words on the slip--which was how she had come up with the name of the CD and with the hit from the CD "Alive and Brilliant." I remember thinking then that this is a fantastic idea, one I've yet to try.

Right now I am experiencing a bit of a blogging dry spell, so I am employing one of my old songwriting methods—writing about not being able to write. I’ve been busy, I’ve been tired. I’ve been hanging out on my boat; I’ve been picking the blueberries off my bushes and eating them by the handful. I have plenty of incomplete blog entries rattling around in my brain, but haven’t been able to get them into any sort of meaningful story for you to read. I’ve been working on my book during my lunch hours, wishing I had an entire afternoon to myself to put all the edits into the manuscript and print it out and read it again. So the dry spell continues.

While I am writing about dry spells, let me tell you about another kind of dry spell. The scuba kind of dry spell. My wetsuit remains folded in the gear bin, my reg and dive computer are coiled up in the padded carry bag. We haven’t been on a dive yet this season and I am starting to get itchy to be underwater again.

Maybe this weekend, then I’ll really have something to write about. Either that or the only diving I will do will be into a hat filled with slips of papers.

3-2-1 Contact!

Sorry, I’ve been very neglectful of my blog. But as always I can explain. See, I am starting the new job on Monday and it was my goal to finish writing my book before I start the job and I did it! I finished the book yesterday afternoon.

I haven’t talked about the book here because I don’t want to turn into one of those bloggers who shamelessly promotes the living hell out of my book should it ever get published. I think it’s inevitable that some promotion happen, I mean I would want people to buy it, but I don’t want to be annoying about it. So anyway, I’ve written a fictional book, and now I need to print it all out, settle down and read it and make a few more edits, and then I’ll be ready to start querying literary agents and see if I can net one that can sell the book. So, this last week it’s been all-book-all-the-time in our house. As a result I’ve largely given up on the endless “settling in” process that happens when you move house, and it also looks like a bomb went off in our house as it’s now filthy where I live.

:::

Today we spent the day at the boat, getting it ready for launch. I have mentioned in past posts about Sabine’s leak and how we’ve been attempting to isolate the source of the leak, and in the process jacked up our electrical system. Well, the electrical was a quick and cheap fix today, and then tomorrow we’ll lay down some fiberglass inside the bilge so we can seal up any holes in there. During the week we’ll replace the depth sounder, which has a crack in it. Hopefully this will do the trick and Sabine will be floating at her mooring by the end of next week. Conveniently said mooring is a only a few blocks away from my new job, so I will have a very short commute on the nights when we stay aboard.

:::

We left the dogs home while we were at the boat, because the temperature has been in the 90’s today. Normally we’d take them along, but leaving them in the truck would have been way too uncomfortable (and deadly) for them, and because the boat is in dry dock right now, it would be impossible to carry a 70 lb Labrador up a ladder. Since we’ve lived here we’ve been leaving them in our vacant master bedroom (which we’ll start renovating in the fall, so we didn’t bother to move our bedroom furniture in there) because there’s nothing for our mischievous dogs to get into in that room while we’re out. Today we decided to let the dogs have the run of the house.

In our old house we couldn’t let the boys have run of the house while we were out because Griffen learned how to open the fridge and help himself to the contents. In the new house we have a side by side fridge and freezer. The handles are higher, so we figured that Griff wouldn’t be able to open it.

Boy, were we wrong.

While we were out Griffen grew a thumb and opened the freezer. He helped himself to a pound of frozen ground turkey, whatever was left of the peas and a package of brats. Of course the styrofoam and cellophane packaging was strewn all over the house, licked clean.

Looks like they’ll be banned to the bedroom for the rest of their lives.