But that’s not what I wanted to post about. I had this dream…

I don’t want to say something as simple as “I dreamed about her,” because I’m not sure that’s true, though she certainly happened to be in the dream.  But I suppose that is how it is said.  I was woken from sleep a little after One AM, and found myself trying way too hard to get back into the dream, because easalle was there.  As dreams do, the details are fading, but the basics I can remember are this:  I was on a sort of walking tour with a group of people, going to see various people give presentations / speeches / readings in their homes, all on a common theme.  I had the distinct impression that it was somehow related to NaNoWriMo, perhaps that it was, in fact, part of National Novel Writing Month’s activities that year.  The “theme” or idea that everyone was supposed to have been presenting on -perhaps that they were supposed to have written their novel about, and were supposed to be presenting re: their novels- was “airplanes” or air travel or some such.. that detail has faded, but not enough to be gone, just … smudged.  And the entire time I was following along with the group, taking one presentation after another, I was dreading that our tour guide would announce the next location was hers.  And then, of course, he announced the next address and I leaned over to the only person in the group I knew -I have no recollection of who this was supposed to be; someone familiar with the situation, involved in NaNoWriMo, who doesn’t hate me and then apparently someone larger than I am, physically, both in height and moreso in girth- and said “that’s her.”  It wasn’t the address she lived at when I knew her, three and a half years ago, but it was a valid address (now faded to incomprehensibility – 422 something’th place or somesuch) and I knew immediately that it was hers.  My companion and I had a hushed argument on the way over about it (something along these lines, though the exact words are lost to the Dreaming: “you don’t have to go in, I’ll stay outside with you,” “you shouldn’t have to stay outside on account of me,” “you shouldn’t have to stay out either,” “I don’t want to cause any problems…”) and when we arrived, we were with the last of the group, hanging back, outside a classroom where she was presenting.  There were a few other people outside the room; apparently all the desks had filled up already, but even as I tried to convince my companion to go in without me, not to hold back for my sake, I slipped into the back of the room and set in a desk at the back of the room in the corner by the open door.  There she was, at the front of the class, and I don’t know if she saw me, and I was somewhat hoping she wouldn’t, and before long she crossed the room and sat down facing the same direction as the class so she could work a projector for her presentation.  It was weird, because I thought she was using an overhead projector -the kind you use with transparencies- but she was showing photos from some sort of road trip, but the images were actually short videos, the sort you would take with a digital still camera, and I can’t remember hearing her presentation but I remember thinking it wasn’t about airplanes or air travel, and whose little blue convertible sports car is that, and who is that guy she’s with, that’s not her husband -it was some blond guy that looked like a celebrity I recognized but can’t think of the name of now- and so I was sitting in the back, in the dark, in the corner watching her give this sort of video/photo slide show and talk to this whole group of people about this thing and all these shots of her and this guy having a great time in this little blue convertible sports car on a road trip someplace nice, with trees and water and small towns, and I don’t know if it was the weather or my wife rolled over or what, but suddenly I was awakened.  And I couldn’t get back into the dream, let alone sleep – I didn’t know what time it was, but it turned out I’d already had about 8hrs sleep.

And the curtain was a little open, so there was light coming in from outside, painted across the wall in front of me.  The light was pink, which means weather to me, since I live in the desert, and then it strobed for a second or two – literally like someone nearby was using a strobe light, though it must have been lightning.  I crawled over to where I could peek directly out the window at the sky, and yes- it did look like weather, a uniform pink sky -and I whispered to the cat who sleeps at the foot of the bed and was now inches from my head “what interesting weather we’re having…”

But I couldn’t get back to sleep, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about the dream, and my iPhone wasn’t in the room because I’d only just laid down for a nap, not “gone to bed” at 6PM, so I couldn’t just sit in bed and look her up.  Got up, relieved myself, came out to the living room, went out the front door for a bit to look at the sky – looked like moments from rain, and it was.  Came in, set down with my iPhone and googled easalle for a bit.  Not a lot to see.  Looks like she’s still alive, though, so maybe my irregular prayers for her safety are helping (admittedly, she is one “her” in a long list whose health and safety I pray for once in a while, but she has not been left off the list since I first loved her).  And maybe she dreamt the same dream tonight, and maybe she saw me there, and maybe this is some other sort of sign, some other sort of reason, some other sort of omen, and maybe it’s nothing.  Maybe [name removed] is reminding me about what happened between her and [different name removed] after the exorcism, so I don’t make the same mistake with the demons I’m confronting right now.  Maybe the dreaming mind is random, full of happenstance, and ought not to be thought long on by the conscious mind.  I’ll try to put this behind me; putting it down into words helps.  Now it’s here, instead of in me.

The rain seems to have passed.

Time to get to work.

• Pre-paying for two months on Roosevelt Row with reserved corner space: $70
• Materials for building a portable “Gallery Wall” to show art: ~$100
• Cost of re-ordering business cards after giving away 300+ last month: $64
• One and a third gallons of gas for the generator (ie: lights): $5.36

And that’s just the new stuff this month.  That doesn’t include costs like canvas, paint, ink, and other supplies that made the art, the cost of having books published, printed, and shipped to me so I can offer them, or the roughly $600 (off the top of my head) I’ve spent on creating the audiobook version of Dragons’ Truth (which I forgot to take any copies of with me tonight). Some of those costs I don’t have to pay again; the printer for printing audiobook packaging & disc labels, the portable wall, the setup costs for books, the audio equipment for recording audio books, et cetera. Still, there has been quite an outlay of money to get things up and running, and the bulleted list above only represents the obvious, new, and direct costs of doing the Art Walk since doing it last month.  There’s just one more bullet to add:

F_ck.

Anyway, I spent about two working days’ worth of time just shopping through the various options for packaging.  Put me a little further “behind” my hoped finish time, but … since I have to wait for these orders to arrive before I can sell physical product, anyway… I suppose that’s okay?  Sigh.

Well, I’m off to see a movie in theatre.

Eventually, I’d like to have the HTML versions right there alongside the PDFs, and if I can get a computer in the house to do it, maybe plaintext versions. Not sure if linking to Kindle versions makes sense, but a mention of them if I get them online, plus to where the E-Books can be purchased for money (instead of just getting the same thing for free) – perhaps on Amazon directly, but I’ll look into that later… I don’t really feel like putting together my own, redundant, online store for E-Books. Oh, and if I finish up a few other projects currently in my way (read: literally in my way, the projects are cleaning and sorting things and getting the piles of stuff off my desk so I have something other than the couch/lap configuration to work at), plus buy a new microphone (I’ll try my old one, but it appears time has … diminished it to less than quality), I’ll start recording audio versions of my books. Which I will give away for free as something akin to podiobooks, as well as sell on (probably hand-made) MP3 and/or audio CDs. So … yeah, won’t have to do much to add those options to the new site design, just add a link here and a link there as different editions and versions become available. At least, that’s the plan.

Haven’t done much about it this month. Haven’t touched the site, worked on HTML layouts, or even started re-arranging book-shelves. bleh. Ooh, if we’re on that vein, haven’t written any fiction, either. Haven’t painted in … months. Maybe over 6 months. Long time. Haven’t been posting here; probably lost you as a reader a while ago, on account of I don’t post much, and when I do it isn’t interesting. Fine. Have you been reading my Pownce? I’m not very active there, either, but I’m using it a bit for micro-blogging, and it’s “public” now. Certainly use it more than twitter. bleh, twitter.

Gotta get off my ass, gotta get things done. The tax refund coming helps with that, some. It was easy before to say I couldn’t do this because I couldn’t do that because yadda yadda money. Everything can go that way; this, that, can’t,: money. Can’t go around in person to independent bookstores and try to sell them my books because I don’t have any books on hand in the format the book stores can order (I have a BUNCH of my old CafePress books), because ordering enough books to do that with costs money I can’t afford to spend. Don’t bother to finish writing another book or even edit my short fiction of late because I can’t afford to publish another book, and even if I did, that’s just another book I can’t afford to try to sell into book stores. Or do marketing for. But that one’s easy/short: I can’t afford to do/buy marketing for one/any of my book(s). Period. Takes money to make money, right? Well. Don’t got none. But, tax refund bought the ISBNs and the first couple book setups last year, and it’ll lubricate some forward motion again, this year. (Although about half of it ought to go directly into emergency/savings, because we have none.) So… we did our taxes, filed electronically, got accepted in about half a day, and should be getting our refunds electronically in the next week or so. So I’m starting to feel a bit more… motivated. A bit more like things are possible.

Looking at the money (mentally), I feel a real responsibility to use it wisely, carefully, prudently. To get the most positive effect for Modern Evil Press with the money available to it. So my wheels are turning. Any ideas?

It’s hard for me to not come across as stoic/callous in this, but it’s like a couple years ago when grandmother died, we’ve all been mourning for a long time. There’s not a whole lot left to do, emotionally, at this point. Nearly all that could be recognized as being Lee McClanahan seemed to have passed from that shrivelling husk of meat some time ago. He wasn’t as far gone for as long as grandmother before she finally passed on, but … Well, suffice it to say we’re all certain he’s better off now than he’s been in a long while.

It took me over two months and multiple attempts to even get through this movie. Two months is a long time for a Netflix disc to not get turned around, by the way. Yeah, yeah, I lost some time planning and executing a wedding, a honeymoon, a move, but this was two hours (ugh, due to multiple attempts at watching it, closer to three hours) I had a heck of a time getting through. On this, the final attempt (semi-successful, since the film is now definitively watched), around half-way through I pulled up some internet sources to explain the film to me. Not just what it was about (which was not yet clear), and what was going on, but why people think it’s a good film. Ugh.

I guess people liked the car chase?

bleh.

My night’s not the worst, though: due to delays at Denver International, Mandy’s flight didn’t leave until ~11:30PM, putting her in Denver after 1AM. I’m not sure her friends will be taking the (apparently) 3+ hour drive to Laramie tonight, or if the roads are still open, or what. By the time I got home from the airport, there were so many other cancelled DIA flights that we were pretty sure I was headed back to the airport tonight. Hopefully I’ll hear from her soon.

And then I can sleep. Not sure about her night, but after the little broken glass incident, I’m sleeping. Blech.

And I went to the other courtroom and got her other friends out of there, and we all talked in the hallway for a while, gave her father our contact info… And she got the low end of sentences, and with good behaviour could get out early, and may even have the possibility of being transfered to a prison that would be less dangerous to her chances of survival… And I tried. And I know they say it’s the thought that counts and at least you tried, but … I wasn’t there to say goodbye. I missed that. I said goodbye on the phone the other day, but …

We’ve been friends for about 15 years, she deserves better than that.

I’m going to try to visit her in prison. The lawyer said that she might be able to have visitors in a couple of weeks. I feel awful about missing this. Hopefully we can get the communication about location a little more accurate for that. Hopefully I won’t be a complete fuck-up next time.

On a side note: basically everyone else who was there to see her off (or to try) had heard of me. Some of them, not through Penny. In fact, one of them didn’t know who I was, standing there, but recognized my voice. From an audiobook version of the Princess Bride I recorded. That she got from a friend … who I’ve either never heard of or don’t know the name of. Who got it from someone else I didn’t recognize.

Which is to say that apparently there are “bootleg”-type copies of … my audio version of The Princess Bride floating around out there. Comforting people in hospital, among other things.

Weird.

But kinda makes me want to get off my ass and record the audio versions of my own books.

Figuring out the money, paperwork for name changes, apartment changes, bank changes, figuring out closet space, bookshelves, duplicate DVDs, what to do when suddenly we’re being bad Americans and producing twice as much recycle as garbage (and if dad weren’t here, it would have been something like 10x recycle v. garbage this month). It’s challenging, but luckily I’m not actually overwhelmed. I had a little anxiety attack last month (sorry, that was a friends-only post), but almost everything has gone smoothly, or at least not debilitatingly.

Oh, plus spending time being the geeks we are, and doing things like watching I Am Legend Thursday at midnight in IMAX, and then seeing Blade Runner Final Cut at the Valley Art Friday night… Plus playing Super Mario Galaxy together. Because being geeky is important, but it’s a time-sink sometimes, too. BTW, the first six minutes of the new Batman movie (attached exclusively to I Am Legend in IMAX), bode very well for the rest of the movie. Awesome.

Okay, I have to go do more laundry, but wanted to make a post. So here you go: a post.

I can’t get myself to shave or shower or brush my teeth or even eat or masturbate (two things I enjoy quite a bit) on any continuous schedule. The “Eat Only/Whenever You’re Hungry Diet” I am a proponent of, I thought up because it is somewhere between “don’t eat unconsciously or as something to do when bored” and “don’t forget to eat because you’re too depressed / manic”. I have trouble remembering to do my laundry, water the trees, whatever. But work. Work I can show up to on time, consistently. Or school, which was just another job. Repetitive. Familiar.

It’s pretty easy, actually, for me to show up to (nearly) every Write-In for NaNo. it’s almost as easy as work. I can even go when I’m depressed, when I’m feeling terrible, suicidal, happy, horny, whatever, it’s a repetitive, set schedule, out of my hands, it’s easy to show up. I don’t really understand why. When I set a meeting time with someone else, that’s easier to show up to than just making plans for myself; perhaps it’s my overblown sense of responsibility. When I say I’m going to meet a writing group at Willow House (or wherever) twice a week, every week, to write and work on writing, that’s easy — Heck, it’s hard to stop, even with good reason. When I tell myself I’ll work on writing at least 8 hours a week, or when I tell myself I’ll go to the Willow House (or wherever) once a week or twice a week or twice a month (that’s harder than ever week, for me, btw), and force myself to sit down and work — I peter out, quickly. Sometimes before the first time I go. If there were even just one other person I was meeting, I wouldn’t miss it. I’d probably be early.

Which brings me around, perhaps, to why suicide seems like an option right now: I don’t feel like I’m particularly responsible to anyone right now. There’s an increasingly un-respected, vague and distant set of financial institutions that own the next several years’ worth of my life, but aside from that, I’ve extricated myself (mostly long ago) from any situations of responsibility. No one needs me, not really. At my job, they just hired two new people and simultaneously introduced a new “checklist” procedure to try to reduce errors. Turns out, the checklist is thorough enough that a single sheet of paper can practically train someone to do the bulk of my job in an hour or less. “Just follow the checklist” and when they get the hang of that, it’s just the occasional question about the various deviations on unusual bookings… F_ck. I just had to remove my “ex” from my LJ friends list because seeing her posting about cuddling with other people was too emotionally difficult for me; and it ties right into this not being needed, not being responsible to anyone or anything, being easily replaceable if, for example, my brain swells up and crushes itself against the inside of my skull because I drank too much water… Actually, about 4, maybe 8 more glasses of water should have done it. I was thinking of going on not saying anything to anyone, but f_ck, do I hate secrets, even when there really isn’t anyone I’m keeping them from.

The closest things to “reasons to live” on Sunday were things like if I dropped dead at work on a Sunday, there would be no one to ‘close’ and run reports, and the bookings would sit on the list all night and management wouldn’t know how much money they made until Monday morning. Or … if I finished killing myself, I wouldn’t have any proper chances to see if I could get some illegal prescription drugs to a friend who called me in the middle of the day about it; turns out I probably don’t have easy access to klonopin, but I couldn’t be sure while at work, since I can’t make personal phone calls or use the internet…

And that’s almost as bad as last week when the reason I didn’t slice open my arms and bleed to death Wednesday night was that I was too tired/lethergic/depressed to get out of bed and walk all the way to the kitchen to get a knife. Seriously. Actually, I didn’t have the drive to turn 90 degrees or get fully into bed; I just lay where I collapsed from standing that night, my legs mostly off the bed.

Thursday, just numb, busy, and saw a funny movie about suicides. Friday morning pretty good, but by afternoon, bad, and by night I was really, really bad again. Did you see me that night? it was bad. Saturday morning, woke up not great, but was pretty good from about 11AM to 5PM… and then after ~8PM I was collapsed in bed thinking about suicide again, and by 10PM I had gotten together enough drive to get out of bed and start drinking water.

And then yesterday I was bouncing off the walls happy. Carried over to this morning, and then some time this afternoon I sortof crashed again. Not so bad that I’m bleeding all over my keyboard, but … well, Pushing Daisies helped. I love that show. it’s great. Anyway, I’m rollercoastering. And no, I don’t know how i’ll be feeling tomorrow, or tomorrow night, or this weekend. But I’ll be at work tomorrow, and at the write-in tomorrow night, and at the Dentist on Friday, and so on. And on and on, until I finally do die. Or maybe, like Adam, Claire, and Peter, I’ll just keep living. I swear, last time I got to 10 litres, I was intoxicated for three days. Sunday I drank over 11 litres and didn’t even get a buzz… I assume my body just built up an immunity to water, like most of the other poisons I’ve tried. Bleh.

Oh, and I got approved for the November 30th through December 7th resort week in Mesquite, NV (a bit outside Vegas) and the time off for it, so I’m doing that. I wish I had someone to take. ((I tried inviting Amber, but I don’t think she took me seriously.)) I won a free resort week for having perfect attendance and perfect productivity (hit my goals all month, averaged by week) in October — there were a few other names in the hat mine was drawn out of, so it really was a win, so “yay”. I got to choose from a strange list of mostly places I can’t afford to go to or literally can’t go to (because I don’t have a passport, let alone airfare), including the free resort week in India at roughly the same time. I decided that rather than trying to save up $2k+ and get my passport by spring to fly to NZ or such, I’ll just take a week I know I can get to and go to legally.

Ooh, and I almost forgot to talk about NaNo this year. So, I tried to write a fictionalized (highly – I mean, a much more intense exorcism, real dragons, non-linear reincarnation, the destruction of the world, et cetera, et cetera) version of the key storyline I experienced during and in the months following NaNo 2004 for my novel this year. I kept having trouble with it… writing even fictionalized versions of events that are based on real life causes me to think back, to look back at, to try to recreate emotionally the experiences that inspired the new story, and that can be very difficult. So I found ways around it, I wrote out of chronological order, I skipped huge swaths of time, and I was making progress. By Saturday morning, I’d learned from the story’s progress what its new end would be, and I was really happy with how it had begun to come together as a story. It needs a thousand or two more words on the end right now, and a lot of editing, fleshing out, cutting out bits, et cetera, the sorts of things that November is not meant for, but in the end, it is more of a short story or novella than a novel. Its final length will probably be around 20k words, based on what I know about it right now. Luckily, it has some themes and elements in common (I’m lying, I don’t really understand what “themes” are… but certainly it has elements in common, and I can pretend it has themes and you’ll believe me, even if you read it) with the other stories I’ve written for the collection I’ve been doing this year, so I’ll probably put it in there and you can read it next year when that comes out. Which, if I stopped there, would mean that I’d failed NaNo 3 years running.

Not such a big deal, I know, and I keep reminding myself, in light of the literal stack of finished books, books in print, books available online and through book stores everywhere, that I have succeeded at creating. Not such a big deal at all. Especially when you consider I wrote my first NaNo novel in 8 days, and the bulk of UTFBF Book 3 in under 3 days. Which is to say: Tomorrow night, I’ll start a new book for NaNo, and try to get an actual novel out of it this time, instead of just a long short story.

So, that’s the NaNoWriMo update.

Alright, that’s about enough for now. Sorry to take up so much of your time. Hopefully these words are priming the pump for something good. I’m trying to decide for the new novel between:

1) Untrue Tales… Book 4
2) A novel-length suicide note
3) A novel describing 50k words of suicides / suicide attempts, in detail
4) Starting where I left off on the Sin Eater book, my 2005 NaNo failure
5) Starting something random with no planning, from scratch

There could be other options by the end of the day at work… but I have to get up for work in a few hours, so I’m going to sleep.