I’ve been having bizarrely vivid dreams lately. Last night’s had me trying to make peppermint tea, needing to share it with someone else, finally making it in a plastic bag that unexpectedly contained sand and salt, so that my tea tasted like ocean water in the end, not at all drinkable. I suspect it was my subconscious revealing my feelings about the book I’m writing. It feels like the ocean, too big, too salty, too sandy — but you know, if you weren’t expecting peppermint tea, the ocean is great. Not for drinking, but certainly for appreciating. Trying to make the ocean in a plastic bag, though, is not so easy. When I woke up this morning, the dream was so real to me that I had a moment of thinking I needed to go find the bag and clean up the mess I’d made.

Yesterday — not a good writing day. Maybe I set myself up for such by talking dust bunnies so early in the morning, but I wound up with a day where I did get lots of stuff done — clean kitchen, two loads of laundry, vacuuming, clean sheets on the bed — but not lots of writing done. Still, two or three months ago, I would have been perfectly happy with a day that included 400+ words, not wincing at the lack thereof, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself. But I am going to dive right into the story this morning. What I was writing yesterday wound up distracting me with worries about cultural insensitivity and lack of knowledge, so today I’m going to try to resolve those issues with some research and move on. The true NaNo-inspired writer would just move on and worry about the research on a second draft, but I’m just not that good at NaNo. Still, with any luck, I’ll hit the 10K milestone today — admittedly, a milestone that I should have reached several days ago — and that will be gratifying. Yay for milestones!