The Final Countdown

This is really exciting...I have entered the final stage of editing for Insignia: final edits! I proofed the hard copy and now I am putting those edits into the document and fleshing out where needed.  The step after this is to go through once for continuity and then.....

It. Will. Be. Ready.

Holy shit...is this really happening?

Maybe so. :-D

I Am A Writer

Over the past seventeen years or so I have gone back and forth in my aspiration to become a writer.  I have asserted that carn-flabbit, I AM a writer.  And then I've been all, "Nah, nevermind. I'm not a writer. I'm not willing to put that much effort into being successful at it."

However, I have learned over these seventeen years, one thing I cannot do.  I cannot stop writing. I have literally tried to force myself to stop writing. Stop reading. Stop imagining. Stop dreaming.

I'm not published.  I haven't even tried.  The whole process scares the bejeezus out of me. Spend years trying to get picked up  by an agent while my stories stagnate and die? Self publish and ruin any chance I have as a published author? Put my work out there and hear crickets in response? No thank you!   I find that I get so driven, I work so hard, get hopeful, and read all the downer talk about how *hard* it is to make it big as a writer. How big-name publishers suck. How self-publishing is career suicide.  What the crap do I do, then?  It looks like this world is in a no-win feedback loop.

So then I abandon my product, move forward with my "real" life and never look back except in my head. I get depressed that I will always be unknown as a writer.  That no one will take me seriously until I got published. But to be published, I need to be taken seriously.....Only to revisit all my work 6 months to years later.  This has got to stop.  I have to at least try.

Self publish? Submit to agent? I don't know yet, but I know that at this point I just have to do something.  I just want people to read my stuff...even if I give it away for free....as long as people are reading it, I don't care.

Because I AM a writer (dang-nabbit).

Zombie Dream 2 - The Escape

This dream started with a jumble of images and colors.  When it finally gaines coherence,  I am standing in house in a cave with some people - I think my Mom was one of them.  The cave was raised about 3 steps above the cavern floor.  It looked kind of like the cave in The Secret World of Arrietty. 

It looked kinda like this house, but the light was a flue and if you had your back to the stove, you'd be looking out into a great big cave.

We had just heard that the zombies were going to come after us now so we were preparing for them.  When the fist zombie starts coming across the cavern floor, I rush out to meet him.  He is like a cyborg zombie with some weird eye binocular (monocular, really) and scissors for hands.  I am grappling with this zombie and grabbing onto his scissor blades, hoping they won't cut me.  Then I remember that I had a katana so I raise that and try to cut off his head.  Unfortunately, i miss his neck and my sword gets stuck in his skull. I had to struggle to free it before the zombie got to me.  Eventually I did, phew!

Then the zombies start coming in droves and we have this narrow ledge to fight on.  I am doing quite well, actually, as I run back and forth beheading zombies with my very sharp Katana.  At one point I'm thinking, "Yeah, we got this. I could do this all day, I'm not even tired."  


Suddenly, water starts trickling over the rocks from the far side of the cave and I hear someone say, "Oh no!  They are going to flood us out!"  An escape plan was quickly gone over as the water rose with unnerving speed.  We had these two upward tunnels that we could climb up if the water got too high.  So, I keep on slashing away until I start seeing partially chopped up zombie parts floating around in the water.  It's almost up to the highest step of the house.  


The wave of zombies has stopped now, except for a few stragglers.  The last of the other people in the cave are crawling up the chute and are calling to me.  I do a once-around of the house trying to decide on what to grab.  I decide on nothing and instead feel that it is my duty to kill the straggler zombies to give the people time to escape.  One of the zombies is a unicorn and another is a giant Komodo dragon....go figure.  I behead the dragon and start crawling up the tunnel.  My last thought is that the grandma (who resembled Math's mom) couldn't make it up and so she told everyone to go without her. 

I totally beheaded this guy  and saw his neck's cross section.  (But I'm not proud about it.  Zombie's were alive once too!)

Ahead of me is this guy and his son.  When we get to the top, it is into his home and his wife and brother are pulling us up.  They pull up the kid, then the dude but before they pull me up the kid asks, "Where's grandma?"  And I say, "She couldn't make it," as I'm holding on for dear life trying not to fall down the straight drop back to zombies and a flooded cave.

The kid starts crying but I brush it off as I struggle to get out of the tunnel.  It seems that the wife and husband are not really trying to do anything to comfort the kid.  But I don't really pay it much mind and wake up shortly after. 

Zombie Dream 1 - The Stakeout

In this dream I'm living at my parents house, and I think Luna was there.  However, this house is in a land crawling with zombies.  In the first part of the dream, Luna and I were on the deck and I can't seem to get over the fear that she's going to jump off the deck and into zombie country.

Then it's night time and I am wandering around the downstairs area of the house.  I get into the room that is now the office, but what was the "rec room" when I was growing up.  It used to have some bookshelves/file cabinets, a wood stove and a dumpy fold-out couch.  That is how it looked in my dream, except for the fact that the whole north wall was gone and in its place was a canvas sheet.  I remember thinking, "Wow, that doesn't seem very secure against the zombies."

I start watching some other people, possibly young college or high school students.  They have a bunch of candles lit and are talking about apocalypse theory.  They ask me if I've read Delillo (Dondelillo maybe?) and his fortification strategies for a post-apocalyptic world. One strategy is to pit one predator against another.  So apparently my house had big cats roaming the perimeter and apparently they weren't affected by the zombie disease.  Another thing one guy was proposing was to dig a moat around the house and fill it with piranhas.

(At one point I saw a cheetah in the kitchen and was afraid of it, but then realize that it was there to kill the zombies so it was friendly to humans and I pet it).

Look at this handsome guy!

Then these guys decide to start messing with this one guy who looked kinda like the fat kid from Lost.  The sheet was pulled back and in the field beyond appeared a figure. He was holding up a hankie and communicating a message of help trying to entreat us (or more like them b/c I was pretty much an observer here) to take him in.  He was talking about all of his skills.

The guy being messed with was going to go out into the dark to help this other guy.  "Don't go out there!" I yell at the dude, but it's too late.  He's already in the field and has discovered that the "guy" was actually just a computer screen and he's turning around to come back inside.  Then I see bright eyes appear behind him (zombies) and I scream, "Watch out!" But the guy doesn't hear me.  Luckily,  these two werewolves jump out of the darkness and start fighting with the zombies so the guy gets back inside.

The Google Maps view of my parents' old house. The semi with the sheet metal would probably've been parked in the red rocks area. 

Then it's daytime and I have decided that since no one else seemed concerned about fixing the gaping hole in our fortifications, I had to do it.  So I walk into this semi that somehow backs right into the house (so we don't have to go out into zombie country to get supplies) and grab some sheet metal.

At this point, The Office woke me up, so I have no idea how the house fared with fortifications after I left.

Dream about Lions

I had this crazy multi-part dream last night with one of my reoccurring dream themes - lions & other predatory animals (including tigers, bears, wolves, hyenas, velociraptors, zombies etc.).

Part 1 - Lions

There I was, shopping in a store trying to buy enough stuff so that I could get a free tote bag (classic Lyndsie). When I finished shopping, I left the building and saw a couple lionesses in the parking lot so I immediately turned around to go back into the store. However, another lioness poked her head out of the door I just left, which meant that I couldn't go back that way. I began circling the building to find a back way in, at which point I realize that I had Shermie with me. I was looking through the windows trying to find a room with a closed door so that when I put Shermie in, he wouldn't take off into this house (apparently the store is in a house) infested with lionesses. 

I eventually found a basement room with those top-open windows so I dropped Shermie in and climbed in after. I did make sure to shut the windows tight before assessing the situation. Somehow I managed to leash Shermie up to keep him from escaping and I opened the door to look into the house. There was an older woman in the hallway and when she saw me, she started talking to me about how she's going to be leaving on vacation soon. I encouraged her to do so, thinking:  "I don't want to see you get eaten by lions."

After the woman left, my Mom and some dude came to the room and started chatting with me. I looked past them down the hall, and saw two lionesses in my Mom's bedroom. "Mom, there are lions in your bedroom, hurry up and get in here." I said with urgency. And they did. So me, Shermie, my Mom and this guy were just sitting in some bedroom without any way to get out and lions all around us. Smart, huh?

It's hard to find a pic where they don't look cute. 

Part 2 - Bears 
Then the scenery changed and I was driving in a car or running down a road with some guy, presumably just having gone to get supplies, being chased by a couple of bears and some other non-predatory animals like deer and horses. Up ahead there was a parked fuel tanker semi thing so we decided to climb on top. The guy gets onto the hood of the vehicle while I climbed up the ladder to sit on top of the tanker.  Left abandoned on top of the tanker were two saws and a couple of Santa hats.

It was a good thing too, because the bears that were chasing us had started climbing up toward me (leaving the guy alone completely).  I took the saw and kept smacking the bears on the nose with the flat of the blade, trying to scare them away. (It did occur to me that I was holding a sharp saw and could do some serious damage to the bears, but I never actually tried it).  Then I started whacking them with the Santa hats but when that seemed to do little good, I went back to the saw. Eventually, it seemed that I had scared them enough to leave me alone so we could get into the cab of the semi and drive away. Shermie was with me again at this point.

These were the bears. They're dancing bears from India,
I actually read an article about them yesterday which is maybe why they appeared in my dream.

Part 3: More Lions
The semi turned into two Jeeps and we're racing across dried up pastoral land (like the kind you see along US36 in Colorado) until we run into this old dude on a horse who's trying to fence in a group of sheep or cows.  Unfortunately, there were also lions wandering around so I told the guy that he needed to hurry and rope his sheep in because the lions would get them if he didn't.  So I and whomever I was with start stalking the lions.  I am trying to shoot at them but all I am doing is hitting trees.

Eventually we get to part 4.

Part 4: Tigers and Lions Oh MY!


Now I am in this house with a bunch of other people that backs up to a lake or bay or something, but is also in mountain-scenery.  There are lions and tigers stalking the area around the house but it's fenced in and protected so they can't get in.  I am sitting on an upstairs balcony watching a tiger lying in the shade.  It seemed that I was under the impression that the predators were eating all the pray and eventually they would die off if we didn't keep feeding them. Then I see this beige-colored chow-type dog running up to the house with a bundle in its mouth.

Look - So majestic!

"Oh my god! Oh my god!" I'm saying as I'm racing down the stairs to open the gate up for the dog so the lions/tiger won't get him.  Unfortunately, the tiger grabs a hold of the dog and starts shaking him and I'm screaming at the tiger from inside the front door (which resembles a batting cage): "Let him go!"

Eventually the dog gets released and comes up to the gate, but now he's a human.  I let him inside and I'm standing there staring at the tiger.  It comes right up to the fence and I'm yelling at it.  Then it lunges at the fence and turns into a human and says, "You think you can beat us, but you can't."

Then I wake up.


The weirdest thing about this dream is that I'm not really afraid of predatory animals.  Tigers are my favorite animal and I find all big cats cute and fascinating.

Japanese Anime Emoticons

This is the Smiley Face: ^_^

 

This is the Angry Face: >_<

Annoyed/Not Amused: -_-

This is the Annoyed Face: >_>

This is the Not Amused/Sarcastic Face: -_-

This is again the Sarcastic Face: -_-

This is the Winky Face: ~_*

This is the Surprised Face: O_O

Confused/Surprised/Disgruntled Face: o_O (see how the eyes are different sizes?)

Confused Face again: O_o

Ven Diagram Fun!

In Anticipation for my next Flash Fiction!