Holidays, Shmolidays: The Holiday Swag Edition, and I make a cover!

I'm not one for holidays... well, except for Halloween. And Christmas, I guess. But being nonreligious myself, and living with a Buddhist, this time of year becomes a celebration of togetherness, good tidings and changing seasons.

And, oh yeah... gift giving.

Materialistic, I am not. Accepting gifts makes me very uncomfortable. Second only to giving gifts. I am the world's worst gift-giver. So I was quite pleased with myself when I settled on a handful of gifts we could both benefit from, and this has become a tradition of ours. (Somewhat. Except when I bought him a guitar last Christmas, I have no desire to play. Not that I don't get anything out of watching him play, though...) Tools, because what man would refuse power tools? We're getting into building things now, another story altogether, and I won't say "no" to a hand-made dining table if he wants to make me one. Also picked up some dharma books, which I really should read myself.

And for me? I received a bundle of Adobe programs, including the one I wanted most... Photoshop! Why did I want Photoshop?

Well, not so I could do this:Okay, yeah, so I could do that.

I've been busy this last week with a seven hour drive south (think warm beaches!) to my grandmother's for Christmas. I love my grandmother, but the woman stays up until 3 in the morning and then wakes up at 7. I hope I have her energy when I'm her age, but right now, I need my 8 hours of sleep. Though her schedule has infected me with a little bit of insomnia.

Tomorrow (5 a.m., urgh) we're back on the road for a seven hour drive north to see the BF's family... think beaches-covered-in-snow, thank you, East Coast Blizzard of 2010!

Dreaming up inspiration

I was always envious of people, writers in particular, who claim to have found inspiration for their stories in their dreams.

I envy them for two reasons. For one, it seems ideal -- go to sleep, a function you normally do in the evening anyway, and wake up with a storyline. The second reason is, I very very rarely have coherent dreams.

A small sampling of my dreams from over the years:
- I was a gummy worm, and I was trying to get from one end of a table to another
- I was a shrub observing the dream, but I was also Will Smith, and I was getting married behind my apartments
- From my old dream journal: I'm running paper towels across campus with my brother and sister. I'm late for my Japanese test, so I keep telling them to hurry. My brother is whining because he says the paper towels he's carrying are too heavy. I tell him to be quiet, he's only carrying 19. I'm carrying 12, according to numbers that are supposedly on the bag. I give my sister my key so she can get in the room, and tell her to call my (now ex)boyfriend and give it to him so he can give it to me later.

But every once in a while, I have a very lucid, very coherent dream.

This is a dream from September. Soren is a character I've been working on for a long time.

Soren and I are in the bell tower of a church, hundreds of feet in the air. He wants me to stay with him forever, to become like him. We climb the rafters of the church with ease, though the construction makes no sense, it is like a ladder to get to the top of the tower. When we reach the top, Soren wraps his arms around me so that I can see nothing. I feel myself wobbling, terrified of heights as I am. He promises he will never let me go. Slowly I am able to open my eyes, and the first thing I see is the strong jaw of my fictional hero, strawberry-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. He looks more ethereal than human. I become aware of my surroundings, which looks all too real. The air is crisp and cool in my nose, and I can smell the wood from a fireplace burning down in the streets below. The fog rolls back, and the first thing I see to my left down on the ground is a cemetery. Even from this height I can see individual grave stones. I see the lights from houses, and everything is so beautiful. I am so aware of the warm body holding me. I have never been loved this much by a man before.

Soren tells me this can all be mine, if only I would become a vampire like him.

The daylight begins to roll in, and the dream feels more like a dream.

We fly down through the rafters again to make it back into the church before Soren is harmed by the sunlight. We don't make it too far, for our feet hit a platform that was constructed during the night over the hole we climbed up through. I yell at him to go, but he cannot. Fortunately we do find our way around, but by this time the sun is up and we can see that the church is now occupied by construction workers building a city inside. We roll and we hide through the streets around the church. The sunlight doesn't seem to be having a physical effect, but more of a psychological effect on Soren.

The construction foreman finds Soren and captures him. I go to him and I bare him my neck. I tell him to feed from me so that he can heal. He refuses and says with the suns effects, he cannot and would never bite me. His fangs will not descend.

It is with this feeling of defeat that I wake up.

And then last night, I had another realistic dream, that got me out of bed to make coffee in the wee hours of the morning because I just couldn't shake it.

I dreamt that I had been offered a three-book contract with the publisher I'm aiming for, and I dreamt through the book I had written for them. It wasn't a particularly engaging story at all, not one I'm going to write anyway. Some erotic wolf shifter series which actually did have a plot, conflict and even resolution. It's more the inspiration that I needed to get back into writing now that I'm on my vacation for the next month. (Well, they call it vacation, even though I'm not paid for it!)

Just waiting for my muse to catch up!