Category Archives: dreams

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz

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Most people have a favorite time of year and there are meaningful arguments for each of the seasons we are fortunate enough to witness. While I can pinpoint many things I love about each of the seasons we have in Canada, I can not only choose my favorite one but I can narrow it down to a more specific time. While it may be fraught with predictable end-of-winter perils, mid-April to early May is, by far, my favorite time of the year.

I got home from work yesterday, slightly after 5:00 pm, and the sun still held the world in its warm embrace. I sat on my deck, glass of wine in hand, and soaked in everything around me. The new blades of grass were pushing aside the oak leaves that I had purposely left for the small eco-systems that help to create a healthier lawn (good information for someone like me who isn’t particularly fond of raking), those pesky Day Lilies I had attempted to vanquish were winning me over with their fresh green sprouts and the world around me was saturated with newness. The trees were proud to show off the promise of new leaves with their bright red buds, highlighted by the crisp hue of the blue sky in the background, and the Spring Peepers were singing their greeting after a very long winter. For those of you who have never heard Peepers, these small amphibians are the truest sign that Spring has finally arrived. This sound is the best way to welcome the new season and a sure way to be lured into a peaceful slumber.

Casting aside the fact that the bugs are still comfortably ensconced in their winter phase called diapause, this time of year could not be more perfect. The air is not weighed down by humidity, the sun’s warmth and strength are just as effective as a mid-July day and the streets are free from the overwhelming increase in population from the summer residents. It’s a win, win, win.

Spring is the beginning of a new chapter. Spring allows me to enjoy all the parts of summer I miss because I work in the service industry. And Spring affords me the time to bask in all of the sights and sounds of a new life waiting to be discovered. It is hope. It is growth. It is a promise of what is to come.

Why, thank you 10pm, I would love a snack

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I came home last night at 9:30 pm after a meeting / potluck dinner and decided I wanted a late-night snack. Since I had leftovers of my spinach dip and pumpernickel bread, this snack was readily available. I try not to eat past 7:00 pm most nights but spinach dip is a favorite so the decision was pretty much made. I went to bed at 11:30 pm and woke up this morning with memories of a very strange dream.

I am always amazed when I wake from a dream and can remember every crazy part of it. Last night’s dream was in color, as my dreams usually are, and bits of the full color spectrum appeared in every strange scene.

My dreams generally consist of pieces of my day but last night was an anomaly. There were massive structure fires raging with a beautiful azure blue sky in the background. Plumes of black and grey smoke rose from the fires as I stood, high on a hill, on top of a frozen koi pond. The fish were an array of spectacular shades of orange, yellow and blue.

Near the end of the dream, I went down to examine the remains of the buildings. There were children running in and out of the charred skeletons wearing green shorts and my brother was sitting on the living room floor playing poker with his friends. When I turned the corner to leave, I looked up and saw my mother’s yellow, daisy-covered long johns hanging over a door that magically survived the fire.

Nothing in my dream can be tied to any of my reality yesterday. I still do have my mother’s long johns but they have not been out of their drawer in a very long time. Unless I want to experience the acid-trip of dreams again any time soon, the spinach dip will be a daytime snack.

What is the strangest dream you can remember?

 

 

The things that go quiet in the night

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The time on the clock read 2:29 am. The waning moon shared its luminescence with the corner of my bedroom and my eyes blinked repeatedly at the harsh difference between the blackness behind my eyelids and the moonlight permeating my bedroom.

love the moon

The sound that woke me was shrill and I tried to convince myself it had followed me from a nightmare. The uneasiness of my dog confirmed the polar opposite of my theory and together we looked out the bedroom window to discern where the awful noise was coming from.

My initial thought was that a baby raccoon was lost and crying out for its mother but it is the dead of winter and they are most likely sound asleep in their dens. As the cry continued, it became much more visceral and intense. My tension escalated and I could not drown out the suffering sounds of nature. There was nowhere I could protect myself from the wretched sound of terror.

The cry eventually lost its intensity and that sound of terror became more and more staggered until it was replaced by the silence of the night.  It took me a long time to get back to sleep.  Between my over-active imagination and my staunch passion for the television show Criminal Mind’s, I’m sure I had created over 200 plausible crime scenes by the time I finally nodded off.

I can only hope whatever predator was outside has moved on to a new hunting ground. And I sincerely wish we will not have to, ever again, listen to the unfortunate nocturnal requiem of the untimely death of wildlife that once felt safe to roam through our woods.

Hold my attention

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Facebook is alive and well with ads for the latest Masterclass contributors. For those of you lucky enough to NOT be sucked into the vortex of Facebook, Masterclass is an online platform for creative people, giving them the chance to learn from their famous mentors. The one who caught my attention and made me investigate this latest phenomenon was Margaret Atwood.

The beginning of her video makes me want to quit everything I have been doing, my job, my charity work and my social life, to just write. When she rewrites the beginning of Little Red Riding Hood by starting with, “It was dark inside the wolf”, fireworks went off in my head. Expletives poured out of my mouth, tripping over each other to be heard and, more than once, I had to pick my jaw up from my lap. Those six words made my entire novel seem like a four-year-old wrote it.

One minute and eight seconds into her official trailer, she said the three words that make writers lose sleep, “Hold my attention”. As an avid reader, I know exactly what she means. If a writer veers into a mundane few chapters, I am more than happy to put the book down and I will eventually forget I started reading it. But if a writer can keep me on the edge of my seat, I am in it for the long haul and I will lose sleep to finish reading that book.

Writing is a tough business, but as Margaret says, “You become a writer by writing. Do it, and do it more. Do it better”. Many people, just like me, have written books. Many people, just like me, believe so much in their story and are convinced it will be published one day. But many people, just like me, are one tiny dot in a portrait created by stippling. We are a minute speck in a massive painting. But the more we write, the bigger our speck becomes. The more we write, the more our words have a chance of being discovered. And the more we write, the more we will master the art of holding your attention.

The needs of the one

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It was the eve of 2019. A creature of habit, I sat in my living room with my Christmas tree lights still on, my dog occupying the space on the other end of my couch and my gourmet dinner for one in the process of cooking.

With the new year only hours away, I spent my new years eve at home, ruminating about the year that has just passed and the one that was inching closer to being a reality. As with every calendar year in the past forty-nine of my life, last year had its wonderful moments and its challenges. Each one of those memories made me realize I am not completely the person I want to be.

I don’t make resolutions but I do take moments to recognize my strengths and my weaknesses and make a promise to myself to focus on the things I need to work on, to nurture myself as much as I do others and to be selfish sometimes and put myself first.

With my fiftieth birthday approaching, it’s time to make this my best year yet. It’s time to cut out the things that aren’t working and it’s time to fiercely embrace the things that truly make me happy.

Wishing you all a wonderful 2019.

2019 – The year of Lark

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I thought he was a character I created, but I am slowly coming to realize he is defining himself. I named him Karl, but from the moment he began to tell me his story he referred to himself by the anagram ‘Lark’. He is a complex soul with stories buried far beneath his skin and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. He repeats the phrase, ‘the dead claim their own’ and I have yet to figure out why but I know he will show me on his terms and it will become a significant part of the novel.

If you have been following this blog, you will know I love to write. I am utterly amazed by the words that travel from my brain to my fingertips at such a speed I have to stop and read them to keep up. This new book I have begun to write is a prime example of that wonder. I wake up in the middle of the night, patting my bed in the dark to find my phone so I can mumble almost unintelligible words that take me a while to decipher the next morning. I hear phrases during the day I feel the urge to write down and I see landscapes I know will become a part of Lark’s world.

He was never meant to be the main character but his voice is rising loudly above the din of the other personalities who already hold a spot in this book. I am eager to welcome the new year so the holiday bustle will become still and Lark can make his way to center stage and shine a light on the life of atrocity he is eager to share with me. He is a poet. He is a killer.

This book isn’t going to write itself.

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I have been resting on my laurels. I have heard that phrase many times before but never thought it would be a string of words I would use in reference to me. And I really do not have any real laurels to rest on. I have written a book, but until I have an agent and am soon to be published those laurels don’t mean much.

After having completed my first novel, doing several edits and having many beta readers love it to the point of not wanting it to end, I rested. There was a brief resuscitation of my writing but the moments were fewer and further between than they should be. Writing a novel is a huge commitment. It is saying “I do” to a keyboard and a collection of strange characters who slowly become family (except for the bad guys).

Book number two is in the works. A few of the characters have formally introduced themselves and we are slowly acclimating. But their stories cannot be told if I don’t make time to listen to them and jot down what they have to tell me. I know they are eager to get the ball rolling and I am the only one who can give that ball the first push and watch it gain momentum.

It’s time to give this ball a shove. This book isn’t going to write itself!

 

Thirty-six days of pure torture

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I think of myself as a thoughtful gift-giver. There were a few awkward years with my nephews at Christmas that I ended up giving them gift cards, but they were always gift cards that would get well used. It may not have been as personal a gift as I would have liked, but teenagers have very specific likes and dislikes. Gift cards are perfect for those conundrums.

The old saying “it is better to give than receive” is something I believe deeply in. I get an immense thrill watching someone open a gift that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about. I love the element of surprise and the fact I try to come up with gifts that were never a blip on the receiver’s radar. I pulled off a few of those gifts this year, the most recent being a hat for my boss that is embellished with a quote from Ozark, one I will not repeat in this blog because of its profane nature but, sufficed to say, he was surprised and he loved it.

That gift-giving shoe no longer resides on my foot, for the time-being. Right now, the shoe is on another foot. I received a text message from a friend yesterday excitedly telling me they know what they are buying me for Christmas this year. That statement was followed by the line, “I’m so excited, it’s going to be the longest five weeks of my life”.

Now, I have received some lovely gifts during my lifetime, but I’ve never had anyone dangle a rabbit in front of my greyhound five weeks before I can chase it around the track! I’m dying. There are thirty-six days until Christmas and I know am going to spend countless hours during each one of those days trying to figure out what this gift could be. This is my nature – I need to solve puzzles, I need to answer riddles.

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The next thirty-six days are going to go by at a snail’s pace and I’m sure I will receive many more text messages about this gift before the holiday is close enough to be almost tangible. There will be no hints, I know that. There will only be the endless ticking of a clock until Christmas finally arrives.

 

Keep writing and don’t give up

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I have written a novel. I’m sure many of you know that by now because I won’t stop blogging about it, but there are times I need to remind myself that I have painstakingly crafted a full, fictitious story from beginning to end from nothing more than my imagination. I am still in the process of querying agents with the hope that one of them will be consumed enough by my story and my writing to send an offer of representation. In the meantime, the continued effort of my writing is fueled by the comments from those who have boldly nestled into my story and offered their wonderful words of encouragement. The subject line of this blog is one of those encouragements after telling me he was engaged by the characters, wanted to pick the book up again as soon as he got home from work and was sad when it ended. That’s always a good sign!

I am well aware that the road to being published is a long and arduous journey. This knowledge is my waking thought, my mid-day crisis and my evening justification for losing those precious moments of sleep while I try to add five-hundred or more words a day to my latest manuscript.

The message, ‘keep writing and don’t give up’ was shared today by a woman who had her third book launch celebration on Saturday. I was fortunate enough to attend the launch and the message during her speech was the same, writers should never give up. I met another author at the launch and her journey took twelve years to get published. Thankfully, I have never been under the impression that publication is lurking around the corner.

So I am going to keep writing and then writing more. And I’m going to keep querying and then querying more. One day, I will be published. Perhaps I will decide to self-publish at some point but I’m not there yet. I know the story is good and it would make a fantastic movie with some great special effects. The thing I am most sure of, though, is that I’m going to keep writing and I will never give up.

 

 

The actual sounds of silence

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I made a bold decision a couple of months ago. I contacted my satellite provider, cancelled my subscription and sealed the deal by sending back my receiver. I had only suspended my service in the past, which resulted in my first finished novel, but I have never gone that extra step to fully end my relationship with my television. If I could catalogue the number of hours I spent mindlessly watching shows that held no interest for me, I would be mortified.

I am a true product of my father. My habitual pattern was to come home from work and immediately turn on the television, as he would do. Perhaps the background noise soothed him from his busy day, but eventually those mindless distractions would lure him from whatever room he was in and he would settle into his chair, randomly flipping through the available channels but never settling on one particular program. I didn’t want to follow in those distinct footsteps.

I am not saying that I do not get lost in the vortex of Netflix or online sporting events from time to time on my computer, but lately my life has revolved much more around the sounds of silence than the overwhelming din of gratuitous television. My post-work hours are spent more on reading and writing than channel surfing through the overwhelming number of anesthetizing broadcasts.

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My Kindle is loaded with new novels. My second book is in the works, my third is more than a promise and my brain is firing on all cylinders. And the moments between reading and writing are destined for the continued quest to become a published author. Those sounds of silence have been loud and clear and have been leading me in a direction I should have been following for a while. And the more I listen, the louder those sounds of silence become.