Pain is scary. In the span of about 10 minutes I went from “I’m sure it’s nothing serious and will pass” to “maybe we should call an ambulance. I can’t get off the floor.” It was serious when I said it wasn’t. What I meant the first time was “It’s not so scary that it trumps my fear of going to an emergency room, or even my fear of calling a doctor to see if i should.” What I meant the second time was “I’m more afraid I’m dying than anything else I’m afraid of right now.”

There is a point where pain trumps vanity. I arrived at the ER in a “nighttime bra” (a tube top to keep the girls and the leak-preventing pads in place), a t-shirt, and some yoga pants. They were the nearest and easiest things to put on. I was way over-due for a shower. I did not care. 4 hours later, when I finally caught a glimpse of my unbrushed, greasy hair in the bathroom mirror, I understood why they’d asked me if I was on any recreational drugs like cocaine.

You never want to hear someone ask your nurse, “is this an I.V. I can do?” You really don’t want her to say yes. You also don’t want the person installing your I.V. to tell you that “sometimes I can be a little messy.” “Messy” in this case means that you’ll end up with a pool of blood under your elbow. As obnoxious as the I.V. in the crook of my left arm was, she clearly wasn’t comfortable poking around anywhere else on my hands/arms. I’m on board with that.

The pain scale is easier for me to use when I think of it in terms of how much the pain affects my daily activity. I’m never comfortable calling a pain a 10, but since writhing and moaning on the floor unable to stand, is pretty much a complete inability to go about my day, that makes it a 10. By the time a doctor poked at me, my pain was down to a 3 and fading fast. I felt foolish until he dug a few fingers up under my ribs and “tickled” my gallbladder.

Morphine isn’t as much fun as they make it out to be. It mostly just made me nauseous. I wanted to be loopy and say silly things. Despite a mis-twitter and a fantastical back-story I created for one suspicious looking doctor, it was rather uneventful. Or so they tell me. I do know that I answered the “how do you feel?” question with “I’m on morphine. I have no idea,” several times.

Ultrasounds are way less fun when you’re not pregnant. Instead of it being a great event and getting a play-by-play from the technician, you just sit there, in silence while someone pokes around at you. Breathe in and hold it. Poke. Poke. Repeat for 25 minutes. He wasn’t “allowed” to tell me what he saw, and the few times I risked a look, I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. It turns out he saw a bunch of stones in an irritated (but not infected) gallbladder but no stones blocking anything anymore.

Once they’ve decided you’re not going to die or do anything else interesting, the ER folks stop caring about you. I don’t really mind. I wouldn’t want nurses or doctors rushing around to discharge a patient while I was waiting for painkillers or anything. I only became a priority when it was clear they needed the room for someone else.

Monkey’s Paw Wishing is dumb. While waiting for various verdicts, I realized this “fixed” a few things I’d been worrying about. We’re still in a risky window with breastfeeding. It’s getting better, but we’re still not “there” yet. I’ve also been worried about making sure I kept off (and kept losing) the weight after giving birth. Nothing says “no more breastfeeding” or “severe weight loss” like a bit of abdominal surgery. Fortunately I think we can work around the breastfeeding issue. This has helped me realize that breastfeeding is important enough to me that I’m willing to fight for it.

Gallbladder attacks hurt more than giving birth. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I was given twice as many “use sparingly” pain pills from the ER doc than I was sent home with after giving birth.

Living in fear is no way to live. Gallbladders are funny things. I’ve had these stones for a while and I might go years to forever without another attack. Or I might never be able to eat a hamburger without ending up on the floor while I still have mine. There’s no real way to know until you push it too far. We went through almost 3 years of Ryan testing his boundaries (without knowing it was his gallbladder) and I don’t want to deal with that. When I woke up this morning, I thought a short-term diet of low fat foods would be just fine. Maybe I wouldn’t even need surgery. By the end of dinner, I was bored and cranky. I wanted more than rice and pasta, but I was afraid to venture into more fat-filled fare. How far could I push my diet until it pushed back? Am I more afraid of triggering attack or having an outpatient surgical procedure to eliminate the problem?

I mostly just want to be past it. Since I can’t ever be “past it” while I still have a gallbladder, it needs to come out. So out it comes.

BUT! I’m still putting this experiment in the “win” column. As I mentioned when I started this, the true reason I participate in Lent is to change bad habits. I’ve done that. I haven’t found a 30-minute niche in my daily schedule to write, sadly, but let’s face it, I can’t stick to a schedule as it is with all the chaos happening these days. I wrote more in those 40-ish days, in a variety of places for a variety of audiences, than I have in quite a while. This bad habit may not have been “fixed” but I certainly put a considerable dent in it.

Most importantly, I pulled my fiction writing motivation out of the muck, which was the goal within the goal. I started off strong, elaborating on a dream, but once I got through “the moment” that was motivating me to write, I didn’t feel like continuing on to the next part of those characters’ story. This left me floundering a bit, but that didn’t last long. Old ideas crept back into my brain and forced me to pay attention. The simple act of thinking back on those stunted stories was enough to keep me going. I spent lots of my not-writing time thinking about what I’d write if I had the time. Insomnia is good for that. All that re-awakening lead to some new thoughts on old works that I briefly entertained (mentally if not always on paper), but it kept me fed.

My really-real goal for Lent was to kick-start my fiction-writing brain so that when it was over, I could pick up where I left off on my “Epic Idea” way back last August. I’ve been afraid of starting the actual writing process for this idea because I know it’s “The One” and I don’t want to start it until I’m really ready. I even pushed it aside for last year’s NaNoWriMo because I felt I needed to practice with a similar type of storytelling. Until the world is fleshed out and the history is fleshed out, I don’t feel like I can safely start telling the story. I wanted to get closer to being able to start it, and since I’d decided that notes and outlines didn’t count for Lent, I’d set everything aside for some sort of Easter-related celebration. I needed to earn them.

Did I?

I’ll never know. Just before Lent was over, without checking any of my notes, simply with the strands of story that still lingered in my head, it began to surface amid all the other stories bouncing about in my brain. A new beginning and a new way to introduces a few key characters emerged. I didn’t wait until Lent was over to get the new ideas down, and over the past few weeks, I’ve felt my mind glue itself to this story. It’s still not where I want to it to be to start writing, but the characters are starting to take real shape and are helping shape their world and history (like they do). Specific scenes have started writing themselves and I’ve been taking notes on the actual story as much as the history.

It’s a great place to be, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s Mission Accomplished for Lent 2010.

I experienced a bonus, too. About half-way through Lent I realized that not only had my writing motivation stagnated, but so had my reading. I had such literary plans for the first part of this year, and they fell ridiculously flat. For some reason I’ve got a mental block the most recent murmur book club title and I couldn’t even begin it. I still haven’t read past the first paragraph. I don’t know what that’s about (my reluctance, not the book), but I plan on reading it this week and including that in my (now out of date) review.

I’m going to need some help staying motivated through the coming months, and nothing motivates me like crossing something off a list. To that end, I’ve been using a web application called TeuxDeux to keep track of miscellaneous tasks and chores. During Lent, I used it to keep track of all my missed writing days (although I moved seriously out of date days to the “Someday” tab so that they wouldn’t be so depressing). Once I clear out my past-due writing days, I’m going to keep that up. I’ve also added weekly reading goals. On Sunday I add 3 of each for the week and tag them with the month/week in the title so I don’t just have a list of “read” “read” “read”. I’ll cross them off as they’re accomplished. When the week is over, any that I “missed” will be moved to “Someday” to be picked up on particularly accomplish-ful weeks.

Because I’ll have those. Right?

A while later (it may have been moments, but I drifted back to sleep and it felt like an hour or so), I heard it again. It was less loud, but still enough to wake us. It repeated three times, almost like a bell tolling. The “metal” sound was still there, but there was another component I couldn’t place. If it hadn’t been ridiculously early on a Sunday, I would have just assumed it was construction noise. Someone loading or unloading heavy things or whatnot. There’s still enough “urban renewal” going on around here that random mornings get a bit loud. After the third boom, there was some indistinct yelling. Was this someone being chased off? Was this a nearby resident voicing his displeasure at the sound? I’m not sure. After that, it was still again and I went back to sleep.

In the morning, we discovered what had happened and it was…disconcerting. The entrance to our building is inset and more or less directly below us. It has two sets of doors to get through, both glass, with glass “walls” that let in a bit more light. The first set grants you access to the shops on the first floor, the second set grants you access to the residences. There’s a security box on the outside that lets you in if you know a code, or lets you dial some friends to let you up. The outside doors are unlocked when the tea room on the first floor is open.

At some point in the night someone had used a steel cigarette receptacle to break through two glass walls and into our apartment complex.

So what happened? Who did this? There didn’t appear to be any additional vandalism or theft, so either breaking down the doors was the point, or they were chased off before they could go any further. It makes me wonder, though. I figure there are pretty much two types of scenarios: malicious thievery, or stupid drunk people.

Which of these bothers me the most? Not the idea that someone was trying to break in. It happens. I mean, it hasn’t happened here. Most of the theft-y crime in our area is car related. Despite what the news tries to tell you about this being the most dangerous city in America, it’s actually not that terrible unless you’re stupid about protecting your valuables, training to be in a gang in a real city (or live in the relatively small area where such training goes on), or are a halfway-house resident who isn’t particularly interested in rehabilitation. …Sorry. Soap box. My point is, that the idea that someone (or a few someones) took the time to plot how to break into our building doesn’t really bother me. Plus, they’re completely random (unless you’re very stupid about advertising how easy it would be to steal from you) so there’s ultimately not much one can really do to completely prevent them without living in a fort.

It bothers me much, much more that this is the work of stupid drunk people. Perhaps it was just a group of passersby daring each other into something stupid, but the fact that a second set of doors was damaged, granting access to the apartment building makes me suspicious. I can’t help but imagine that it was the work of someone who lives in my home and thought it would be cool/fun/easier to just bash in the doors so they could get upstairs when they forgot their code or whatever. This may sound less plausible, but it’s well within the realm of possibilities. This building is a pretty solid mix of older couples, a few very young families (like us – young referring to the age of the children, mind you), and whatever we’re call yuppies these days. Young kids acting like they’re the shit because they’ve got a swanky loft downtown and haven’t realized that college is over and they probably shouldn’t treat the place their parents have paid for like it’s a dorm. It’s only noticeable on big party weekends (this is St. Pat’s weekend) or when one randomly throws a party. Sunday morning the elevators reek of sticky beer and people leave bits of trash or whatever in the lobby, the garage, or in the elevator banks. It’s not cool, but in a building that’s large enough that you can remain relatively anonymous, you’re bound to get a couple of bad eggs who think that the rules don’t have to apply to them because odds are nobody will know it’s them.

At first, my reaction surprised me, but then I remembered how our country generally reacts when under attack. Remember the Oklahoma City Bombing and how devastated and freaked we were that it was “one of us” that planned and executed the whole thing? It didn’t seem possible, and in many ways it was more disturbing than 9/11. At least then, it was “others” we could point the finger at and take a small amount of comfort in the fact that they want what we have. Am I oversimplifying? Of course I am, but the general sentiment is the same.

I’d just rather when the email comes out that it talks about an attempted break-in that was scattered by our alarm system and talks about the ridiculously fast response time of the local police department. I don’t want to see the cops pull up in a couple of days and arrest someone I’ve shared an elevator with who couldn’t bother to respect our communal space.

It was a huge flashback to nanowrimo in November, and my “excuse” was largely the same: pregnant.

My response, however, was not the same. I guess that’s the difference between nanowrimo and Lent. Realizing that the several days of backup was causing me stress (“I’ll never catch up” became my unwelcome mantra), I wiped the slate clean. It’s what Jesus would want me to do, after all. I took the the overdue assignments off my teux deux list so they wouldn’t keep haunting me and started fresh on Monday.

Although it wasn’t posted until Wednesday (it needed some graphics and a test result update, on Monday I started with a blog post about Elliott and my 26 week checkup.

Tuesday just wasn’t happening. It’s hard to make Tuesdays into anything but a rough day, and once I get home from rehearsal (the bright spot, granted, but makes everything else difficult) I need something to help me wind down, but writing is too much effort on a Tuesday. I know, I know. Hanging out in the desert being tempted by the devil wasn’t too much effort for Jesus, but still. He’s Jesus. I’m not.

Wednesday I went to the zoo and although I didn’t technically write fiction, I did spend a good half hour or so hanging out in the lakeside cafe plotting a crazy novel. I’ve decided it counts, since it was a dense 3 pages of notes and lots of character motivation and logistics got worked out. In short, it was a solid half hour of writing.

I also made this entertaining note, which isn’t a “story” but is longer than what twitter would have allowed me to say:

Today I watched what looked like a battle if the sexes, but may have just been sea lion vs. seals. I’m fairly certain that only sea lions hang out in this pool, but I have vague memories of a zoo keeper saying differently during a feeding time lecture. Anyway, three females (or seals) were sunning themselves on the main rock formation. The Alpha Male (or the lone sea lion) hops out of the water and starts barking up a storm, basically telling the girls to get off his rock and out of his way so he can have his seat back. In his defense, he had been there earlier, by himself, and when he went for a swim, the girls jumped at the opportunity for some sunbathing. The Alpha Female (who was sunning herself on the highest point) turns to the other girls (who are shifting to make room for the guy without so much as a complaint) and starts barking at them. I’m guessing she told them to hold thief ground, because they stop making room and go back to sunning. The Alpha Male starts to bark at the Alpha Female, but he eventually concedes and worms his way into some of the free space on the rock. Clearly discontent, he picks his head up every so often to bark or snort or wiggle around on the uneven surface he’s been resigned to. The crowd gets a kick out of it (most haven’t been there for the whole show) but the girls on the rock generally ignore him.

The larger brown lump in the center is the boy

It turns out that I’m much better suited to giving something up than adding something in. I can handle the “withdrawal” issues of giving up chocolate or internet, or soda (not caffeine mind you, with true withdrawal issues) much easier than forcing myself to spend 30 minutes each day writing. Last week I was at 7 of 8, but only 5 of those were “on time”.

This week, I managed to pull off 4 of 7, plus make up for the one missed last week.

On Thursday I wrote more fiction. The story I’m working on is one of those self-indulgent “will never see the light of day” deals triggered by a dream I had after playing a bit too much Dragon Age. It’s not fair to say that it’s fanfic, because it’s all original characters and could be anywhere at any time, but it’s certainly not quality and I’m not bothering to work on the world behind the story at all. I’m sticking with it, though, because it’s the first fiction I’ve written in several months and being all secretive and self-indulgent and letting it be the crappity-crap that it’s become is the best way I can get back into fiction writing.

My hope is by the end of Lent (and possibly before), I’ll be warmed up enough to take another stab at a fairly robust world that I’ve created. There’s still a decent amount of ground-work I’d like to lay before I start writing much of the story. Usually I don’t do quite this much pre-work, but I’d like the story to be more than just a relationship between two primary characters and to do that, I need a web. I’m trying to be more George R. R. Martin and less …oh, let’s go with Stephanie Meyer. It has not escaped me, however, that all this plotting is delaying the actual writing for more nefarious reasons. So long as I don’t write it, it has maximum potential for being awesome. I’m not so paralyzed by this silly dream story, which is why I’m working on it, instead.

Friday I posted a bunch of reviews on Yelp. This almost felt like cheating, since it was 4 or 5 very short efforts that I combined into about 45 minutes of writing. Since it was for an audience other than me, however, I feel like it counts. I was also getting (nicely) nagged by my community leader for not posting anything even though I’d received the “Elite ‘10″ sticker on my profile. I suspect I’ll be going back to the yelp well a few times this season, assuming I visit enough new places or dig through old ones I haven’t reviewed.

Saturday I did nothing. I’m not sure why.

Sunday I wrote more fiction. I stopped on Thursday in a good spot where I knew what would happen next, hoping (like Hemingway(?) suggested) that I’d easily be able to get going. Sadly, I failed to make any notes about what would happen next, so by the time I got to it, I’d forgotten. I also failed to note anything I’d thought about including on Saturday, so I was a little stuck. Eventually I worked it out and made sure to not only end at a high point on Sunday night, but to also write down where that note was going next.

Monday was a big day. Since Charlotte’s at daycare all day, I can sacrifice some chore or personal time and easily make up a day or more. I started with an article for murmur that’s been ridiculously popular. I can’t take even a portion of the credit. I mostly just opened the floodgates for everyone to talk about their favorite subject: themselves. Also on Monday, I made up for a skipped day in week 1 by whining about my easy pregnancy because it’s only 90% easy instead of 100% on my blog about my kids. Kids. The fact that’s plural is still pretty flipping absurd to me, and #2 isn’t even here yet.

And then…. And then I didn’t write any more this week until late this evening – nearly 3 full days later. Tuesday was more or less understandable, since Tuesdays are my fullest, most brain-stressy days. I still could have smashed a bit of fiction in that evening, but I didn’t. Wednesday I have a great excuse for, and yet not at all. It was another “Charlotte-free day,” but around 12:30 I took a pretty rough tumble and crashed into our TV console. I spent the rest of the day (and coincidentally free evening) lying on the couch playing video games while being both shell-shocked and relieved that I wasn’t spending the time instead in a hospital room dealing with a broken hand, dislocated shoulder, trashed knee, or god forbid, a fall-induced pregnancy complication. Any or all of which it seemed I had just narrowly escaped. Especially the shoulder one. Could I have spent some of those hours writing? Oh sure. I should have, too, but I was just…completely not in the mood. I could have dropped one or two in this afternoon, too, but instead my body decided that I really, really needed to sleep. Worth it.

That means as of completing writing this (which I’m counting – but for Week 3 since it’s Thursday), I’m now 3 behind. That’s not terrible, and it’s easily surmountable so long as I take the time to fix it, but it’s … disheartening.

So what’s the problem? Lots of things. Like I said, it’s much easier for me to be tempted by something restricted and walk away for a couple of moments over and over and over than to sit down and say “do this until it’s done.” It’s a procrastination issue. There will always be more time later in the day, or extra time “tomorrow” to catch up when I’m not feeling in the mood. Except there’s not more time later. Or there is, but I don’t use it. Or there is, but something comes up and I don’t have the chance to take it.

My plan for week 3 is to put myself on a tighter schedule and restrict certain other activities until after my writing is done for the day. I also need to up my reading (from not at all to every day – just like writing). I’ve been tempted to modify this lenten goal to be “read or write every day”, but I feel like I’ve committed to writing and switching it up now is cheating.

Plus, it’s a sneaky way to avoid writing, which is the opposite of the point.

“I was in Vegas for the first few days. I tried, but there was so much–”

“Sin?” he’d ask with one eyebrow arched as he jotted a note down with his quill on a gilded page.

“Well, I was going to say fun and distraction and stuff to do.” I’d push at whatever passed for ‘dirt on the ground’ when you’re standing on a cloud. “But fine. Sin. Although I didn’t really sin. I mean, unless you count the gambling and the unkind comments I made about all the hideously-dressed women, and the sips of alcohol and the general gluttony of food and…”

He’d look up through gold-rimmed glasses that he didn’t need, but had a powerful effect on the penitent.

“Right. Quitting while I’m ahead. Plus, you’ve probably got all that written down.”

“Indeed.” He’d set down the quill, fold his arms, and lean back on his throne. “And how did you compensate for your shortcomings?”

“Well, I pointed out the chorizo in the nachos Gina and I shared on Friday…after her first couple of bites anyway. I’d forgotten about the whole meat-thing she does. But it was after my first bite, so i think that counts. And then I helped that one kid at the blackjack table who had no clue what he was doing and…”

I’d be cut short by the arched eyebrow and simultaneous glare through the glasses.

“Oh. You mean about the whole ‘giving up not writing’ thing, don’t you?”

One curt nod.

“I managed to squeeze in a couple of reviews one morning before everyone else got up, but that was the only time I could really write without sacrificing time with my friends or husband, and you wouldn’t have wanted me to do that, would you? When we’d all worked so hard to give Gina that awesome surprise trip. You guys and Gina are real tight.”

He’d be silent, but I’d know I’d scored at least half a point.

“Anyway, I only came home a few days short and I didn’t want to just not-do those days because that’d be too easy of a cop-out, so I tried to make up the difference as quickly as possible.”

“Tried.”

“Well, I doubled up on Monday–”

“Writing an article enabling more people to sin , you mean? That’s how you compensated for slacking on your promise?”

“Yeah….” I’d clear my throat and study the cloud again. “Oh! But Tuesday night, I tried fiction instead of a blog post about Elliott or Charlotte! And that was after a long day and a rehearsal and everything. That was pretty good, right?”

“It lasted all of 20 minutes instead of the pledged 30.”

“Fiction is hard!” I’d whinge. “I was so out of practice and it was so late and I was tired and grumpy and I was still sick so I was coughing every few minutes and driving Ryan crazy.”

I’d hold my hands up to stave off what he was about to say.

“I’m not saying that 20 minutes was worthy of a day running around the desert being tempted by the devil, but it was way harder than anything else I’d written so far this Lent. It was humbling, even.”

“So by Wednesday afternoon of your first week,” he’d say as he checked the tome once more. “You’d skipped four days, but compensated for two of them, which means you technically pulled off six of the eight days, even if three of them were about or inspired by your vice-filled weekend.”

“And I was planning on writing more that evening, so by the end of the day I should have been almost caught up. That’s pretty good, right?”

“And did you?”

“Um…..” I’d look around the clouds for a moment and lower my voice before continuing. “I don’t know, It’s still Wednesday afternoon. I’m writing a blog post where I have a fictional conversation with a fictional construct so that it counts more as Wednesday’s ‘writing’ exercise and less as a status report.”

He sits back again, clearly satisfied, and the gates to the rest of my day slowly open. I exhale.

“So long as you don’t justify that single effort as both a post and as fiction.”

“No sir,” I say as I curtsy in my robe and skip on through.

I contemplated giving up soda completely. I’m already limiting my intake because of the pregnancy, but switching completely to tea and coffee would be a nice daily reminder that I was Giving Up Something.

Then again, I thought, why was I doing this at all? If I was a practicing Catholic, the pregnancy would render me exempt from participation, possibly to the point of sinning if I did it anyway (especially the fasting parts). I thought about not doing anything, but it just felt wrong not to participate. So I asked myself why, when I’m pregnant and “not even Catholic,” was this so important to me? Why do I do it?

The answer is simple: I do it to fix bad habits.

I’ve never been the kid who gives up candy or soda and then binges on it Easter Morning. I use the framework of Lent to help shape up some part of my life that needs the extra “support” of Lent’s camaraderie and structure. It’s like a New Year’s Resolution, only this case, people expect you to succeed instead of give up within the first couple of weeks. After all, Jesus is watching.

The question became “what bad habit do you want to fix?” I have lots of big and little things about me that I’d like to change, and even when you eliminate the dietary and physical changing that cannot and should not take place right now, there’s still plenty of options on the table. There’s one absurdly obvious choice that was so clear anything less seemed like cheating.

This Lent I pledge to give up not writing.

From now until April 4th (I do not subscribe to the “Sundays off” idea) I will spend 30 minutes writing something other than an email, a twitter update, or a grocery list. Some days it will be blog posts, others murmur articles, and most importantly, many days it will be fiction. Short stories, abandoned novel ideas, fan fiction if i’m completely swamped for ideas, poetry (okay, probably not poetry), whatever calls to me, so long as it’s made up. I’m so bummed at how completely abandoned my fictional pursuits are. It’s unrealistic to ask myself to write fiction every day, but I’m shooting for about half of the days to be fiction.

When I say writing, I mean writing. Not 30 minutes of note-taking or character exploration, or hunting down images or loading posts online. Not finding some half-dead article or blog post and polishing it up for publication. 30 minutes of really-real “starting with a blank page” writing.

Happy Lent!

(And yes, this post is today’s effort)

Fine. Call it a temper-tantrum.

Today, I’m going to try and look at it as a Phoenix Day. At some point all this building pressure is going to cause an explosion and make a big mess. Once it has passed, I’ll start picking up the pieces and arrange them in a whole new way and everything will be “better.”

…At least until the next Phoenix Day.

I was myself in this dream and I was more or less the same age I am now (although I was not pregnant), but it was some sort of sci-fi setting with lots of white. The initial setup of the dream has deteriorated, but it was a relatively simple concept: I was one of several people who volunteered to die so that everyone else could survive. Was it because supplies were short or because there wasn’t enough room in some escape pods? I have no idea. I’m sure the trailers for AMC’s “The Prisoner” had something to do with it, since Ian McKellan was the “head” of the group and was in charge of overseeing our deaths.

The pill’s lethality took the form of a sleeping aid. We would gently fall asleep and then never wake up again. Gentle, right?

Not so much. This was one of those dreams where certain things feel “real” beyond the scope of the dream. When the pill kicked in, it felt as real as if I’d popped a Benadryl or “PM” version of a pain killer in real life. In the dream, I started to panic. It wasn’t so much that I had changed my mind, but that I would either wake up in the afterlife, or just never wake up at all. I would know, or I would never, ever know. I wanted to share these last thoughts with my husband, but I was too far gone to speak.

In the dream, I fell asleep under a terror so palpable that my heart was racing when the dream ended and I woke up.

I’m still a bit terrified. I’ve had an exhausting weekend, and every time i start to sag when I need to be awake, I feel like I’m back in the dream. My imagination runs wild, and I start to wonder If I’m really dead, still stuck in the dream world, or if this time, when I fall asleep, it will be forever.

I’m a little bit pregnant, and unfortunately for nanowrimo, it’s the stage of pregnancy where I’m at my most exhausted and my most unmotivated. To say nothing of the 24/7 nausea that prevents me from doing much of anything except willing it to go away. I tried fitting writing in with everything else that was happening. I tried sacrificing what i could in favor of writing, because that’s what nanowrimo is about.

It just wasn’t working, and instead of being something that i was looking forward to, nanowrimo was becoming something that was adding another level of stress to my life when i really didn’t need it. It’s not likely I’ll get out of this phase until sometime in december, so “waiting for it to get easier” wasn’t an option, either.

I think it would have been different if i’d been more invested in my story. I can’t pretend that’s not also a factor in quitting. I’m just not into it. All stories come from outside inspiration, but there’s something that gets “hooked” internally to make it work. This novel has been lacking that, so far. It just feels like I’m assembling a puzzle into something that looks like a novel but isn’t right. In order to make the novel work, I have to invest much more into it, and like i said, I don’t really have the time right now. Maybe in my second trimester, when things are supposed to get easier before they get umpossible again, I’ll host a personal nanowrimo.

This doesn’t mean you get to quit. Far from it. Unless you’re also hiding a life-altering medical condition, you keep plugging away. I’m still going to be a cheerleader, so look for a post on murmur.com in the next couple of days about how to get past the ides of November.

10,398 words and out.