I dreamed that I received an email from an agent who wanted to set up a phone call with me. For some reason, though, in the dream the email came through not to my laptop or my phone, but to the butter I’d just put into a hot frying pan. And though this didn’t strike me as strange, it still wasn’t ideal; the butter melted before I had a chance to read the whole email in it, much less respond.
And as absolutely ridiculous as it is, I still woke up from that dream with one second of frantically thinking it might have been real and I had to figure out how to get the butter to show me that email again.
That’s my first querying dream, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been querying my horror novel, These Familiar Walls, for two and a half months now. Which is about how long it took me to have wedding dreams during the wedding planning process (the most exciting of which involved a hostage situation, the worst of which involved teeth and fingernails), and also about how long it took me to have pregnancy/baby nightmares each time I was pregnant (the most disturbing of which involved demons and my father, the most fun involved a fire truck).
It’s funny that I had that dream now, because I’ve realized recently that the feverish way I had been checking my inbox for the first month or two after the Pitch Wars showcase has worn off. If I get a query rejection I shake it off and keep going. It’s not something I ever would have imagined I’d be good at before I started submitting short stories to magazines and anthologies. Spending a year getting used to the publishing world from that side of things really helped me a lot.
And I’m drafting my new novel! It’s going really well. I’m 51,733 words in as of today, a little over halfway through, and I really like my characters, and I’ve managed to give myself the skin-crawling creeps a good handful of times already. It’s a good feeling. I’m enjoying it a lot, and I think I’ll be done with the first draft by the end of this month.
Overall, in spite of that weird dream, I’m in a good place with my writing and with myself right now. (And I’ll be in an even better place when remote kindergarten is over, but that’s a blog for another day)