I don’t like writing to my blog during NaNoWriMo as every word here should be a word written on my latest project: The Kraters of Ivory and Jet. I want to leave some word trail and record however, thus, briefly…
I woke up this morning dreaming about having a difficult time navigating a route that I was used to traveling quite easily in earlier dreams. As usual in the dream world things had changed and I was spending most of the dream trying to figure out the changes and completing my route. Things were fine, I was recognizing my way, until I ran into a gathering of old friends I had recently reconnected with. They were playing a table top RPG without me. I was surprised I’d not been told of the get-together, but not unduly upset. One of the last things I remember about the gathering was that there were two tables. In the progression of the game, a player moved from one table to the other. At the “other” table was one of my friends and a senior student of mine who took it upon himself to demonstrate a certain game mechanic. Amazed that this student was with my friends, I left. Afterward, however things in the dream started to change, my route of travel suddenly without recognizable landmarks.
In frustration I began rising from deeper sleep to nearly wake up. I began tossing and turning with each fit and start of the dream, asking directions, looking for landmarks and getting involved with other tangents—one of my daughters, my youngest, hiding in a corner and mumbling,
“I hope she doesn’t see me; oh, I hope she doesn’t see me.”
as an old lady in a ha-jab emerged from an apartment in a tenement.
It was then that a dream voice said,
“It’s not that you are having a dream of travel during the course of which the route changes; it is that you are having a dream about a course change. That is, you have never traveled the route without the course change.”
It was then that I gave up, realizing that this was true because I couldn’t remember where I was going or what it would look like when I got there for the simple truth that I had never been there…yet.
NaNoWriMo is odd. I write during that month like I wish I wrote at other times. There is something about being connected to a community, though online it is a rather illusionary and ephemeral community. Regardless of its amorphousness, I rise on a weekend at 04:00 to feed the dogs and start the coffee pot and to write—on a weekend!—because I crave connection so much.
Wrote Cornelia Funke, in her YA novel Inkheart,
Meggie Folchart: Having writer’s block? Maybe I can help.
Fenoglio: Oh yes, that’s right. You want to be a writer, don’t you?
Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it’s a bad thing.
Fenoglio: Oh no, it’s just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
To paraphrase and perhaps add my own spin…
…it’s just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world [of those who] create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
Maybe that’s it.
I have never been more busy and overwhelmed by work in my 29 years of teaching. 55-60 hours a week for a salary that contracts for 37.5 […and that’s all I’m going to say about that–I don’t want to be a pisser-and-moaner as I chose this career. Neither, however, do I want to pretend the situation is fair or equitable, so I’ve made my note, now back to the subject at hand!]. Still, despite the workload, I’m going to try my hand at NaNo once again. Three “wins,” as the NaNo gods like to say, and two losses, which they do not like to say, leave me with no illusions as to how hard it will be under present work conditions.
The Salamander's Quill 