Note to self: Drink less Coke at 11:30 at night. Not the caffeine factor. It’s been playing hell with my dreams. Last night, I dreamt, in Technicolor, that I was camping with some friends and then a crazy islander ran up with a look in his eye that meant business, and proceeded to cut off my head with two sharp knives. There are four oddities associated with this event:
1) It happened in slow motion
2) I didn’t feel any pain from the severing
3) I was still able to think and see as my head rolled off
4) My last thought was to avoid splashing blood on my pristine white shirt. I did so by directing the arterial spray outward.
Alas, I never found out the fate of the white shirt. I woke up just as I saw the islander smile in satisfaction and run off into the jungle. I own that particular shirt that I was wearing. You’d avoid spilling your own blood on it if you could help it. It’s that comfortable. As for the islander, I seem to recall that he had suffered from abuses earlier in the dream at the hands of a miserable cur of a pirate captain, and he and I bore a slight resemblance to each other. The hazards of unconsciously creating a doppelgangbanger…
In case you haven’t seen it, check out my mashup trailer for V For Vin Diesel, which, if made, would probably be the single most testosterone-laden movie EVAR. The process of making it wasn’t too bad. Several hours in the editing cockpit, which included downloading trailers from other Vin Diesel flicks and cutting out the best parts, reassembling and adjusting dialogue, adding sound effects and finally picking music. All in the name of science. Or something. It was a fun project. Now if only I could get paid for it!
Wrote some more in Book 2 after taking all of last week off to pursue paying work opportunities. That’s the trick these days; making time to do what you must, but making sure there’s time left to do what you want. Sometimes there simply isn’t the means. It’s like putting Vin Diesel on one end of a see-saw and a tiny tot on the other. So I plug away. I am happy to note that I’m a quarter way through writing Book 2, though suffering from a frightening case of “How am I going to end this” shakes. I’ve got several scenarios in mind, none of them entirely satisfying. I have been trying to draw the threads more tightly, whilst guiding the comfortable world I constructed carefully toward dystopia, whilst selling my own theological, cultural, and philosophical market shares, all without becoming diluted or straying down the path of selfish pap and self-indulgent conclusions. I am trying to challenge myself with the point of the story as well as readers, and I certainly don’t want to sell anything short with the ending.
But that’s vague enough to be disinteresting, right? Sell today. Buy tomorrow. And by that I mean I’ll see you later.