Dream Vacation: Fail

    You know that feeling where you wake up and think you're late for something so you start off with a panic and your day jumps off a bridge to accelerate from there? I'm not having that. What I did have was a weird dream where the kids and I were on a holiday, the place we'd borrowed from a friend or family member was a disaster, and that I stress-cleaned into the wee hours of the morning. I woke up feeling completely done for the day because I'd just finally gotten everything sorted away so that the kids and I could all sleep comfortably and wake up to have the best of our awesome vacation every day going forward... So basically I tucked in my kids after cleaning all night and then woke up.
    But I woke up in my bed, in my house, and not on a tropical ocean vacation. 

    My friends, my day didn't jump off a bridge to get the required acceleration. My subconscious set me up to get pushed! Now I'm sitting here, typing this up in the middle of a clean-house feeling, but still have the whole day ahead of me and a messy house. My anxiety would be having a hay-day party about everything I have to do here in reality if I wasn't feeling so ripped off. The anxiety can't even get a foothold. It'll probably find one later, but right now I just want to stomp a foot: I organized dream-closets, people!
​    The dream-vacation home was nice, too, and we were all totally excited to be there for the next two weeks! I didn't even get to lie down on the dream-vacation clean sheets that I'd dried outside on a line in ocean scented air. My kids were even so tired that they fell asleep right away. I sleep less hours than they do, and I was looking forward to a good sleep on clean sheets and then morning coffee with an ocean view. Waking up in reality was a right, royal rip-off.

Click an image in the slide show to read that free short story :)

Click a cover in the slide show to see more about the book :)

    Be grateful for waking up and blah blah blah. Lol. In all honesty, the offended part of my brain is about fifty percent. The other fifty is still in a finished-cleaning high and I woke up feeling pretty great. I'm still feeling ripped off, but motivated to happily go tidy up my own house. So... thank you, subconscious? It's raining today with no sign of the weather improving, so it's a good day for cleaning up rooms, tidying away toys, eating gooey hot comfort foods, and making some kid time. Meaning that the kid time will probably be the majority of the day and I'll be proud of myself for picking up in the living room. Sounds like a good balance to me! ;)
​    As for writing, I did finish that space opera novella this week. It was such a fun story to draft and I love the ending. I'm hoping for more stories in that universe filtering into my brain, but I'm not expecting it to happen. I'm already excited about getting back to it for editing, though. 

    And it seems that I've hit a point in my writing life where I'm just being handed creepy ideas. I'm not sure that I'm doing them the service they deserve, I don't usually write creepy, but I'm enjoying the twisted takes these short stories are spiraling off on. My hope, coming into a summer off of posting short stories so that I could focus on writing them, was to have one creepy story I could develop into a horror short for posting around Hallowe'en. (I'm not good at horror, but someone who is volunteered to help if I could get the idea started.) In the past four weeks I've written for six prompt words and ended up with a sad story, a children's story, three creepy stories, and a novella in space. With three more weeks to go before my soft deadline for switching from drafting to editing, I'm exceedingly happy with the outcomes so far.
   Happy anniversary for everyone involved in the first lunar walk! Space is awesome. We'll probably be spending some time today at the Telus World of Science to celebrate. Hope you have a great weekend!