What Dreams May Come

I'm still on a self-imposed writing hiatus to allow my system to recover/equilibrate after all the recent changes/stress/etc. in my life. My motivation and interest in writing is returning slowly, so I should be back on track by the end of the week. I spent this evening futzing around with yWriter, a "novel building" software that I downloaded for free (virus scan checked out ok!). You can get it here. The concept is REALLY cool, and I'm an organizational junkie, so I may end up using it. My big problem is the formatting: I can't use italics, nor Times New Roman font. And it only exports to .txt (not .rtf). So I dunno...I may stick with Word for now. But oh, if I had all of those nifty utilities in Word!

Anyway, the main topic for this blog post was the dream I had last night (this morning?):

I dreamt that I had somehow impressed an agent enough to sign with them, and they sold my book practically overnight. The original number thrown around was $200,000 (!) but after negotiation I ended up with a final deal of $93,000. (Holy Crap! That's more than I make in a year.) I put all the money in a high-interest savings account, because I wasn't supposed to spend it yet. Why? Here's the funny part: my book wasn't done. In the dream I was basically where I am right now. But the agent (and editor) were so impressed with my concept/outline and writing samples that they bought the book. But then I had to bust my @$$ to finish and polish the darn thing, and I wasn't supposed to spend the advance money until it was published. So, I started in and about then my alarm clock went off.

Of course, that could never happen. I'm realistic in my understanding of first-time author advances. I'm not doing this to make money; I'm doing it to write a novel and get it published. And I don't flatter myself that my story/writing are so good as to get an agent and a publishing deal without a completed MS.

But it was a fun dream (may it have some basis in future reality!) and it did perk up my spirits a bit. *g*