The last several weeks I’ve been falling into bed, mentally and physically exhausted, sometime around 4 AM. During the week, I get up at 7:15 to wake the girls up, but since mid-March, I’ve been heading back to the covers for another hour before starting the day.

I power nap sometime in the late afternoon or evening, depending on how involved I am with whatever my tasks are for the day. I figure that 20 minutes or so is what keeps me going until the early morning hours since I don’t generally drink caffeine after 8 PM anymore.

So, about 4 hours of sleep out of what I should be getting (8-ish). In those hours, I visit all kinds of strange places, mostly New Bedlam related, and see all kinds of strange things. No drugs I’ve ever taken have given me such amazing, vivid and totally trippy dreams like total exhaustion gives me. For instance, this past Tuesday, I dreamt (quiet, you – I know the more accepted form is dreamed) I was in the poolhouse in the town where my aunt and cousins used to live, and I was scrubbing my face for some reason. I was looking in the mirror, trying to take care of a blemish (ZIT!) and out popped a superworm, which then morphed into what looked like a near-skeletal cross between an amboin cleaner shrimp and an albino scorpion with buggy black eyes.

Thursday night I dreamt Care really did have a horde of zombies on hand to battle the world with, and she kept trying to feed the cats to them. They were eating them, yes, but it seemed our five cats kept re-spawning in a box next to Care’s legs.

Last night I dreamt I was in that house* again, trying to find someone. Someone kept calling from the room behind the panels and I wouldn’t make the trek through the secret door and across the scary people, so I was going room to room, trying to find another way. Someone needs to stay out of my dreams, or someone’s going to get his ass kicked next time I see him. x-P

In other words, I need to start scheduling time to go back to the house in New Bedlam and let the nightmares loose for a while. :-/ The block is shifting, so I expect I’ll soon be pounding the keys again. And of course, every time the block shifts, I want to go and catch up on forums and whatnot.

Today I went to check in on the other WriYe participants, only to discover that my account has been deleted. When I dug into the reason, I found out they’d decided to start removing people that don’t appear on the forums at least once every two weeks, or at least often enough to know that they’re in danger of being deleted. I don’t go to the forums more than once every two months or so. I have a zillion other things going on, but I almost always make sure I send in my verification files on time. If I miss one period, I wait for the next. But now, actually doing the writing no longer counts as enough to participate, you need to be on the forums as well.

I just don’t have time to play those games. I have novels brewing, I have a company and magazine to run, I have family and friends. If that means I can’t officially participate in a NaNo off-shoot, oh well. I can have someone else verify my word count. I will miss touching base with some of the other folks, but I won’t miss the attitudes or the games. To be brutally honest, I think the solid friends I made there have already skipped off to greener pastures (at least, none of them have mentioned WriYe in two years), and I was basically just sticking around for the challenge, and the verification.

No big loss. If I add that fifteen minutes or so, every two months to my sleep schedule, I’ll actually get another hour and a half over the next year!

By the way, check out the new spotlight author and novel at Belfire Press!

* That house appears in a lot of my dreams, and has done for a good nine, ten years. I was once told it was me, working through issues to grow as a person. I’ve written about it here before, and it is a HUGE part of my story Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds. I think there’s a room for every story, and a trip through the house to get there.