A Decade of Dreams
Roland has returned as a working PC laptop. It took a couple of failed attempts to recover the old hard drive, then the intervention of a new Dell department who use Technorati to search blogs to find out what people are saying about their product. When they find someone in trouble, they see if they have a warranty or if there is anything they can do to help the situation.
I'm very impressed by this. I had pretty much given up on Roland as a laptop and was ready to move back to a desktop. However, Larry, a Dell customer advocate, contacted me and helped me out. Within days, I had a new hard drive, an XP disc and a long email of stuff I should do to make sure the Dell laptop would run correctly. Yesterday, I spent six hours getting Roland back up and running to my specifications. From applications to chat programs, from bookmarks to calendars.
I now feel comfortable enough with the new Roland to go back and start working on him as my primary computer again. In a couple of weeks, I will still be getting a desktop computer that I will use as a back up to this one. To mirror it. I will also be getting an online backup system. I don't ever want to lose data like that again. It sucks. Especially for a person like me whose work is all contained in their laptop.
I know it isn't the end of the month but I'm going to put up my Year-to-Date 2007 Scorecard. I plan to do this for the end of every month. Just to keep me honest.
Submissions: 11 of 60+ (ahead)
New Short Stories: 5 of 24+ (ahead)
Freaky Friday Fictions: 5 of 50+ (on track)
Books read: 1 of 24+ (behind)
Novel #1 word count: 9,000 of 75,000 (on track)
I think I'm going to call this month a productive success. Especially with Roland dying halfway through. I have gained a couple of experience levels as an author on the way to the prestige class of published novelist. For the first time ever, I had a magazine come solicit me for fiction. That totally made my day. Also, I have started looking for agents. I've got my eye on one but if he turns me down, I'm going to move on to researching multiple agents in my genre.
I had a really interesting discussion with Cherie recently about being a working author. She presented an interesting opportunity to possibly augment my Writing Year with a pretty steady income that would be freelance writing work that I could do from home and while I'm working on the rest of my ambitious writing goals.
I know I said that 2007 was going to be for me and for my writing. But, the idea of possibly turning this Writing Year into a freelance writing career, while pursuing my fiction writing, is just too good to pass up. Plus, I am a freak about my finances. While my checkbook still looks fine I'm watching the numbers within in it get smaller and smaller. It is making me antsy. Bringing in any money would help this anxiety. If I could do it through my writing, that is even better. Plus, it would look great on the resume.
So, I'm going to pursue this possibility and we will see what we see.
I spent a good part of Sunday updating my online dream journal: Dreamlines… Realities Within. This year, April, will mark a full ten years of dream journaling. I've put all of my dream documents into a single document called: A DECADE OF DREAMS. The word count on this document, as of now, is 87,000 words. That's a pretty hefty chunk of words. Truth be told, I had many more dreams than the ones I wrote about. Only the ones that seemed the most interesting to me were written up.
I'm proud that I've been able to keep the dream journal going for so long. There are a lot of things I can tell about myself through my dream journal. The least of which is the fact that my writing style has improved 1000%. No joke. I learned that I have trends in dreaming which I call "dream themes." The most interesting to me are:
Invasions and Rebellions - Dreams about aliens (or something) is invading and I am part of the rebellion or repelling force. These usually have me running in them and that just makes me smile.
Water - Dreams that involve water in a significant way such as large bodies of water, running water, floods, tsunamis and oceans. They seem to represent the creative force of my imagination and my ability to create.
In Character - These are dreams about my characters or are my characters having their own dreams. I find these fascinating.
Epic - These are the dreams that have an "epic" feel to them. They are so large and have so much detail and/or back story and/or universe that they feel like they could be turned into novels.
I would ponder the possibility of publishing these as a book but, often, people find other people's dreams really boring.
Tarot Card for the Day: Temperance, Inverted