Last Night’s Dream
Okay, I lost much of last night’s dream due to waking up multiple times, but here’s what I can recall.
The wife and I were in the woods, way back in the woods far from civilization. We were with a large group of people out to watch an experiment. The giant building we stood by looked like a long-abandoned office building of some sort, but very wide! The entire bottom floor had been gutted, the windows knocked out, and almost nothing inside but debris. Off in the distance someone counted down and the walls of the bottom of the building fell away. Like completely fell away. This left the remainder of the building floating and there was much applause.
We went up a ladder and into the floating building and wound up in an Asian (I’m not sure what kind) restaurant. We sat with a family of Asian folk and for some reason my food was brought out first. It was a heaping plate of noodles and veggies and chicken and it was yellow and delicious and I started eating and tried to get others to join me. They were having none of it.
Instead the rest of the people (the wife included) waited for the next round of food which turned out to be lobster. Giant lobsters. HUGE lobsters. They weren’t cracked and had a green sauce drizzled in a zig-zag pattern and sesame seeds sprinkled on them. They looked tasty and I broke off a claw and started eating the meat and scooping up the noodles with the claw and eating with the the claw.
Then I woke up with a tummy ache.
Make of it what you will. My mind creeps me out some times.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
I know my dream was longer, at least my brain is telling me it’s longer, but I don’t recall how it started. When my memory of the dream begins, I’m walking with my favorite nephew (They’re all my favorite) and we need to get somewhere in a hurry. We (I? him?) decide to cut through a self-storage lot. We didn’t think it fully through and when we get to the back, we’re stuck on an island and everything is flooded. We try to make our way across the mess of branches and rocks when I find an old, rusty knife.
That’s when a homeless person comes rushing up and starts yelling at us for violating his space. We’re not supposed to be there. No one is supposed to be there. We need to get away from there in a hurry or he’ll hurt us. My nephew had kept going and was now in a precarious position. We got out of there, I gave the man back his knife and we left. Now that it was getting dark, we needed to be even faster in getting where we needed to go. Though we did spend time trying to catch tadpoles in the water. I guess we weren’t in that much of a hurry.
We wound up on a sidewalk walking past a lot of other homeless people. Most of them far dirtier than the street they were on. None of them wanted anything. None of them begged, but they were all in a line waiting for something. Well, all of them save one man that stuck out.
There was something wrong with his legs, that much I knew due to him lying stomach down on a wheeled device. He had his arms removed just below the elbow and in order to move, he had to crunch his stomach and then release much like an inchworm. He yelled at me when I asked if he needed any help. He said something like “Do I look like a cripple?” I was a bit taken aback, but we let him be.
We wanted to find out what the line was for so we went inside the building the homeless people were waiting outside. There was a lot of orange and blue and greens, but I didn’t recognize the company. There was a large woman dressed in dirty rags arguing with a little man in a suit, balding, wearing glasses and looking quite annoying with the large woman shaking her fist at him. The complaint was that the company had used images of these homeless people in an ad campaign that proved to be highly successful and now these people were the ‘face’ of the company. Unfortunately, because they were homeless, they were given a small fee of $5 for their picture and made to sign a release allowing the company to use the images any way they wanted. Now these people wanted to be properly compensated. The arguing got louder, the people flooded the building, and my favorite nephew and I were late.
Then I woke up.
What does it all mean? Where does my brain come up with these things? Where do stories come from? We may never know.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
My dad and I were flying around in a helicopter. We flew over a smallish lake (more like a pond) and a large group of people were in the middle around a dead body (face down). We flew in to get a closer look and the closer we got to the people, the smaller we became. We were also invisible as no one saw us flying next to them. And we could fly through them. My dad was flying because I hadn’t learned how to fly the helicopter yet.
We landed on the side of the lake/pond and my dad disappeared. I watched the people for a while and they appeared to be sitting in the middle around the body as if waiting for something to happen. I decided to walk out and join them. They water wasn’t clear, but more opaque blue and an unnatural color of blue at that. My first step onto the water and I found I could walk on it like ice. It was firm when I reached down and touched it. The closer I got to the middle, the softer the surface became until I started sinking into it and I decided I didn’t want to get my new shoes dirty, so I left.
Then I was packing up my crane. I was about half-way done demolishing a house. People booed me as I was clipping up the cables. I tried to tell them it was going to rain, but people didn’t want to hear that. Then it went from fairly sunny to dark. Not like a cloud moving across the sun dark, but the street lights came on dark. Then thunder and lightning. People oohed and ahead and when the hail came, they ran for home. That’s when I decided it would be fun to operate the crane in the rain and started it back up and smashed the rest of the house by driving over it again and again with the treads of the crane rather than deploy the boom.
Then I woke up.
I had a couple smaller dreams before finally getting up, but those one escape me.
I think the lake/pond was filled with pudding that had firmly set at the edges, and was not fully set in the middle. I’m wondering why people gathered in the middle to look at a dead person. Hmmmm. I wonder about my dreams at times.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
Somehow I wound up in the trailer home I grew up in way back in Minnesota, only it wasn’t still in Minnesota, it (along with the addition and basement) had moved to Canada and was in a strange location I’d never been in. The addition on the trailer was still unfinished (the two bedrooms still had no doors or walls) and the back door had been moved from the read of the house to the side. Still, I knew where I was.
I found myself sleeping in a recliner and when I woke up, I realized that the animals hibernating the in the basement would be waking up because the last snow was finally melting. And I was right! First the bears left through the back door. Most of them were small and lethargic. I stayed in the recliner and watched them leave. The last bear was so large that he shook the entire trailer as he left and I rolled off the recliner and hid behind it to watch him leave. I was happy to see him go. He scared the bejezzus out of me.
Then the last animal left. This one wasn’t a bear. It had a bear’s forelimbs, but a tiger’s rear end and a head that looks like a mash up of the two. It was narrower than the last bear, but taller. I watched as it left and once I knew it was fully out the door, I leaped up and rushed to close the back door (it shifted from the side to the back once the last animal left). I watched through the screen door as the animal walked down the hill. It stopped, sniffed, and turned back around. I knew it was hungry and I was stupid for watching. I should have just closed the door. The thing came back.
He head-butted the back door several times and shifted the trailer off its mounts and caused a split in the side. Wolves saw the opportunity and came through the opening. Then I woke up.
My second dream wasn’t nearly as vivid. I can still smell the animals leaving. Maybe that’s just me. Hmmm..
So in the second dream, a tarantula was running for president…and won. I think it’s because I was watching “All the President’s Men” documentary last night. I need to finish watching it tonight. Great stuff. I also need to watch the movie with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. I’m wondering why my brain translated Nixon as a tarantula.
There is much to do this week! Two books should be headed your way! Paradise Palms and My Teacher is a Vampire. I will, of course, let you know when they drop!
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
I had a great dream! I did! Sadly it escaped me in the morning heat, but I do recall my second dream. In case you’re noticing a pattern, yes, I have multiple dreams during the night. Most I can recall, some I cannot.
The one I can remember isn’t nearly as exciting as the one I forgot. The one I forgot I woke up all excited (not that way!) and felt like I needed to go somewhere. I blame being shut in the house for a couple days and being down all day yesterday being sick.
So, the dream.
My Team Lead (from work) and I were driving a 4×4 out in the woods. We were chasing our other team mates who were on quads. There was much mud, many dirt roads, and racing through the trees. For some reason we were playing vehicle tag. In my dream it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as real life would be. We ‘tagged’ someone and then drove off into the woods. I don’t recall who was driving, I just know my team lead and I were in the vehicle. My sense of perception was in front of our vehicle, not from inside.
We drove over to a pool that was shaped like an O, but squared off. We crossed a small platform to the middle and stood there watching people swim around. I wanted to jump in and wearing only my shorts (where did my clothes go?!) I almost did. Then I remembered that I had my keys (the wife’s actually) and my cell phone so I couldn’t go swimming.
A woman was getting ready to go into the water. She put on her headphones and clamped her phone in a waterproof case and away she went. I thought that was quite interesting (I’ll have to see if this is a real product). The case was filled with a waterproof/conductive gel that allowed her to still use the phone while it stayed dry.
My team lead and I hopped back into the vehicle and drove away. For a short time we made our own road through the woods, knocking down trees, plowing through a river, scaring small woodland creatures. Then we got back on a dirt road with huge dips and ruts.
Then I woke up wishing I could remember my first dream. It’s a hot morning and will likely get hotter. At least I’m not feeling crushing pressure on my brain from my sinuses today.
Today I’ll spend some time writing, some time editing, and some time working on a friend’s website. Should be a good day.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Why I went the Self Publishing Route
I post regularly over at sffworld.com and here is a post that some might find of interest. It’s most of the reasoning behind why I went self-published vs traditional published. The main thread is here.
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My two cents:
I decided to go the Indie (self-pub, whatever you want to call it) route. I’ve been writing since the 90s, been submitting stories and books since 1999. Been on these forums for quite some time. I’ve developed quite a thick skin. Over those years I’ve written over 100 shot stories (most of them are terrible) and 14 novels (a few of those suck and a couple have been completely rewritten). I’ve submitted to publishers and agents both big and small both via snail mail and email. I’ve collected a large number of rejection letters (all of them form letters for my novels). I’ve even attended conferences and had one publisher that said pull me aside for a personal conversation and had me pitch him my novels and asked me to send them along. After more than a year with no response, I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands.
First of all I’ve been watching the self-pub movement for quite a long time. I’ve watched the vanity presses suck in authors with hopes and dreams and watched people get taken. I’ve watched people toss their one book they spent 15 years writing and re-writing and watched them fail because no one bought their one book. I’ve watched podcasters skyrocket to stardom (Scott Sigler, Mur Lafferty, Nathan Lowell, Tee Morris, Philipa Ballantine) and a couple do very well being persistent and release multiple podcast novels to coincide with their novel releases (both traditionally and self-published), and others release one novel, release a book, and wonder why it failed. I’ve watched J.A. Konrath and read all his blogs. I’ve watched Dead Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathrine Rush, Michael Stackpole, Amanda Hocking, and many others go the self-pub route and have great success, but I’ve also watched a LOT of other smaller name authors have a level of success that has allowed them to quit their day jobs and write full time pulling in a nice annual income with many titles.
What I’ve seen is those that can produce a large volume of work reap the rewards. Those with one or two titles generally fail because they don’t see immediate success and throw up their hands and give up. This isn’t a game of throw your book out there and you’re guaranteed success. You can’t force people to your book in 6 months and expect it to be a hit. That just doesn’t happen. All of the people I know that have made it spent years working hard to improve their craft and wrote a lot of books. Amanda Hocking release 9 books her first year and did so in a hot genre that helped her gain popularity. J.A. Konrath acquired his backlist and got better editing, better covers, and re-released them all. Same with others I mentioned. They fought for their backlist, got it, and put it out there. People couldn’t find their backlist due to publishers not giving these authors priority. They’re a rare handful.
As for me, I’ve done a couple podcast novels, but due to life happening I stopped. I had released one novel myself, but again, life happened and I stopped. This year will be different as I never stopped writing. I have a backlog of 14 novels and several in process of being written and/or plotted out. A couple of my older books I will be re-writting because I know I can make them better. I have a great and inexpensive cover artist. I have three friends that all proof read my work (one is a technical writer with a background in editing, another went to school for editing because when she retires she wants to be an editor, the other is just good at picking my stories apart for content). It’s taken me many many years to reach the point where I’ ready to get my stories out into the world. I also have a backlist of my own stories that I’ve had edited, I just need covers, book layout, and I can get these books out the door and into readers hands. I’ve spent nearly a decade watching the market, the self-pub movement, and keeping an eye on what’s worked and what hasn’t.
I didn’t come to this decision lightly. I would love to have a standard publishing contract from a major house, but I’m not getting any younger and I’m frankly tired of waiting and submitting and waiting and being rejected. I haven’t been idle and I know it’ll take a long time to gain readers. Going this route, for me, won’t mean overnight success. It might take me another five or ten years to gain an audience, but I need to keep at it and keep trying. Getting my books out there, going to cons, doing interviews on podcasts or where ever I can, and doing blog tours, anything to get my name out there. I also need to keep a steady stream of books flowing out. I need good covers. I need good editing. I need to be patient.
If you’re wondering, I currently have 5 titles out (2 middle grade, 1 collection of short stories, and 2 novels). I currently sell about one book every other day. That’s since the start of this year. I’ll be releasing two more books next week (1 middle grade in the same series, 1 sci-fi thriller novel). I’ll be releasing another novel next month. I’ll be re-releasing my first self-pubbed book with better editing the month after that. I’ll be releasing at least one novel per month for the rest of this year. If I’m lucky, I hope to sell a book a day by the end of the year). I’ve got next year planned out and I’m writing books to release next year, this year. I’ve got 10 years worth of books planned out and I have no real intention of stopping. I’ve got many more ideas than I can write in a short period of time and I am a fast writer. Last year I wrote 490,000 words. This year I’ve written 100,000 thus far and I’m shooting for 365,000 as a good goal given my release schedule. I’ve got a spreadsheet to track my progress. I’ve got friends pushing me to stay on track. I’ve communicated with my family my goals for the coming years.
Even with all of this in place, I still might fail. That’s a very real possibility. But if I don’t get books out there and try, I’ll fail before I start. I can’t have that. I have to give it a try.
So what am I getting at with all of this? Don’t just jump into self publishing without being aware of what you’re getting into . Don’t think this is a road to riches. If you’ve got one book, I would recommend rethinking and keep trying to get that book through a traditional publisher. Write another book, and another, and another while you wait. If you’ve built up a number of books and you’re still not getting anywhere with traditional publishing, then consider self publishing. Understand that you’ll need to learn cover design, you’ll have to learn scheduling, you’ll have to learn book layout, you’ll have to build your blog and your website, you’ll have to learn all the distribution outlets for your book and ebook, you’ll have to learn all those systems for getting your books into the hands of readers. Yes, you could take your word doc and throw it up on kindle tomorrow, but ask yourself what you’re hoping to get out of it? You’ll only get out what you put in and there is so much to learn.
I said a lot more than I intended. Wow! I’m sure I could say a lot more, but suffice to say, do your homework before making the jump. Don’t just jump and hope. Hope doesn’t sell books.
Last Night’s Dream
Welcome back to another installment of “What’s Going on Inside Jay’s Brain?” Remember, this is a dream (actually 3 today).
First dream was weird. Well, okay, all my dreams are weird, but last night I cannot even begin to explain. The first dream we were on a family vacation. Everyone was there including all of my wife’s family and all of my family including my dad (we lost him a few years ago). That wasn’t the weird part of the dream. The weird part was we were at an abandoned water park with a broken sign. Everything was dirty, dark, and rather ugly. I’m not sure why we went there. Dead leaves blew around. The water was murky. The alligators looked hungry. Despite all that, we got into rafts and went down some sliding rapids that went on for a long time and had to dodge alligators all along the route. At one point it was my turn to jump off a platform and into the water, but the alligators were waiting for me just swimming around. So I jumped, landed on the back of one and woke up.
Then I fell back asleep and my dad and I were running away from an alien invasion. Buildings were burnt out. We needed to get away. We wound up inside my Uncle Bob’s apartment.
Quick aside, my Uncle Bob is…special. He’s been declared as a paranoid schizophrenic. When he’s not medicated properly he had some peculiar behaviors. He’s also invented a number of great devices over the years, but due to his condition he’s never been able to successfully market any of them. He’s also an incredible artist.
So in Bob’s apartment we needed to find some things to help us. We got out a couple of expandable backpacks. By that I mean they opened all the way up and had many smaller pockets to put things in. We loaded up one for my dad that when folded properly, looks like a regular backpack. Mine, on the other hand, was HUGE! and was like carrying an unrolled sleeping bag. I kept asking my dad for help, but he’d gone off. So I tried to do it myself, but saw a small cube on a dresser that lit up. It was made of hard, white plastic mesh with colored flowers. Each flower had an LED light that complimented the color of the flower (Yellow flower had an orange LED, blue flower had a purple LED, etc). It was fascinating. I started to take it apart to try and figure out why it was lit up. There was no power anywhere in the world. This thing shouldn’t be working. It was plugged into the wall and when I unplugged it, it stayed lit up. I pulled the cord from it so I could take it with me, but it started to fall apart once I did that. My dad showed up and asked what was taking so long. I showed him the pieces of the box and started to cry.
and then I woke up. Confused.
Then I fell back asleep and had dreams about going to the bathroom in public (in fountains, on people’s lawns, in a lake, next to a river.) Then I woke up and realized why I was having that dream.
I don’t claim to understand my dreams, but they can be entertaining. I blame this one on two nights of taking good sinus medicine. 🙂
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
Last night I only remember having one dream. I had to take my good sinus meds due to the Santa Ana winds deciding that my butt needed some kicking. I even had to use my nasal spray. Ugh! At least I took them early enough that today I don’t have medicine head.
Onto the dream!
So The wife and I went out to dinner to a new restaurant. It was all fancy and everything. It was also inside a parking garage. Not like sectioned off, but inside. Stalls had been cordoned off to show where the restaurant was. So the cooking area had 3 or 4 stalls marked off and each table was in its own parking spot. The waiters had to cross moving traffic to deliver the food. It was interesting to watch them dance across the traffic with trays of food and not get hit.
Then I was in a different eatery, a deli? with a laptop open and typing something. A man sat across the table from me also on a laptop. We were in a chat room and he was asking me questions. I didn’t type with my hands,but words appeared on the screen. I knew he was asking me personal information and for some reason I felt he should have anything he was asking for. He asked for a lot of things that were personal, but not damning and nothing he could exploit (where did you grow up, who was your best friend in 5th grade, things like that). Then he suddenly slammed his laptop closed and motioned with his head that I should follow him.
I did.
We got into separate vehicles. I got into sputtery truck and followed him. We were parked in a field and went to a mall and drove around a department store. I got yelled at and lost the person I was following so I got out of sputtery truck and started to push it. This made the perfume ladies happy and they stopped complaining that I was driving through the mall.
When I finally mananged to get outside the mall once again, I was outside, the sun was shining, and my alarm was going off.
Some day I’ll understand my subconscious, but not today. No idea what all that meant.
On the plus side, I installed an application last night that I spent all of last year working on and much of this year. It felt good, but now come enhancement requests for changes, new features, and everything else.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
I had two dreams again last night. I find this strange, but who am I to question the sleeping brain. Sadly, one is lost to the aether.
The second dream I was in a yogurt shop. I mean a HUGE yogurt shop. I had a dish of raspberry frozen yogurt and I was looking for toppings to put on it. The strange part was it was a small dish. I never get a small dish of FoYo. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was I couldn’t find a topping I wanted to put on my yogurt. It’s not that they were not toppings I wanted, it was that the place was a mess. When I went to find the mini M&Ms (I never use mini M&Ms so why was I looking for them?) they were covered in something that looked like a cross between peanut butter and chocolate sauce (Nutella?). I wanted to fish some out, but even the serving spoon was covered in the goop.
I went looking for cookies or something to put on my yogurt and all the cookies were crumbled into a fine, powdery dust. I licked the tip of my pinky, dipped it in the cookie powder and gave it a try. Yuk!
When I tried looking for fruit (fresh fruit, fruit in that sugary sweet syrup, any fruit) the manager started to follow me around. He kept telling me that my yogurt was melting and I’d better find toppings fast or my yogurt would go to waste and he wasn’t going to give me a refund just because I took too long to pick out my toppings. For some reason I didn’t complain about the state of the toppings bar (and it was a disaster). Some of the containers were empty, but the rest were all mixed with something I wanted with something I wouldn’t put on my yogurt. Like chocolate chips mixed with peanut powder, some crushed nuts with coconut, the M&Ms mixed with some goo.
Somehow, and without my doing, I wound up with two toppings. One was little colored vanilla wafers with letters on them. They spelled something, but my brain couldn’t translate it. The other was an oddly shaped piece of chocolate. By this time my yogurt was amply melted and the manager kept saying ‘No refunds! No refunds!” and for some reason stood behind me looking over my shoulder trying to get me to the register as quickly as possible.
What does it all mean? Pfft. I don’t know. I hope I never end up in this yogurt shop.
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
Last Night’s Dream
So I asked on Twitter if people would like to hear about my dreams because I have some strange dreams from time to time. Okay, they’re strange almost all of the time and a majority of the time I can remember them. Last Night’s is a two parter.
The first part of my dream had me waking up and checking my phone. My alarm had gone off. Looking at my phone it was only 1:30am. Confused as to why my alarm had gone off, I went to turn off my phone and it melted through my hand. I sat up and fought to keep the liquid goo from getting away because I didn’t want to lose my phone and I still needed my alarm to wake up in the morning.
Yeah, that one woke me up. I had to touch my phone to make sure it was still on the nightstand. It was. So I went back to sleep. And oddly enough, I checked the time. I was a little freaked out that it was 1:40am.
My later dream was a little more interesting. The wife and I were looking to play some basketball. We had a ball. We had out uniforms on (a mash up of a Lakers’ uniform and some other team with black and white checks). It looked cool in my dream. We found a game at a church. The building was a large cube with towers at the corners. Each tower was rounded off at the top. The inside of the church was filled with broken pews and lots of torn up bibles and hymnals. We didn’t know where the game was until we heard the whistle and we ran for the roof!
Up the stairs and we were on top of the church. They’d laid asphalt on the roof and put in a basketball court. I didn’t question the wife going up and making a dunk. I was just happy. We played ball for a short time before it began to rain. I have no idea who all the other people were, but we played basketball on top of a church in the rain. Then the wind started. My favorite daughter appeared and said it was going to get worse. I reassured her that things would be alright. She punched me.
Then the wind really started up. The towers on the corners of the church started to sway. The rooftop court was suddenly inside and we were looking out windows. That didn’t protect us from the wind and the lifeguard seat the referee sat on also started to sway wildly. The towers crashed down. The lifeguard seat with its bright-yellow umbrella crashed down. We all too the spiral staircase that appeared in the middle of the court down into the church. We decided it wasn’t safe to stay there because the floor turned to mud. Sitting at the pews were a few of my favorite daughter’s friends. I don’t know who they were, but we tried to encourage them to come with us. They wanted to wait for their parents. I clicked the remote on the car and our massive, double-sized hummer crashed their the wall of the church. I told everyone to get in.
Then I woke up. I wanted to go back to sleep, but it was really 5am this time. I had the feeling that when I touched the screen on my phone to turn off the alarm my finger might go through it. It didn’t.
I’ll post more of these as I remember them 🙂
Until Next Time!
WOO WOO!
J.R. Murdock 