Hello World! I think I have returned from the morbid land of the sickly. While I am still weak and protecting my energy, I am so much better.

And Morbid it Was
In the second phase of being sick my thoughts turned dark...surely I had some strange illness that was slowly chewing away at my insides. Surely my days were numbered. I started having conversations in my head with my husband about how to talk my mother through the aftermath of my death. I mean, crazy stuff! Then the funky dreams began. I had a nightmare one night that came back to me while I was meditating last night and so prickled me with terror that I couldn't focus on my meditation!

Then all night long, though my dreams themselves were not scary, this feeling of terror kept creeping back over me. I couldn't sleep with my back to the door. Each time I got up to let the cat in or out I felt all the hairs on my body stand on end. I know it sounds incredibly therapized, but I think this is the banished terror of my childhood. Once upon a time I was the world's biggest scaredy cat. Truly. EVERYTHING scared me. And my friends knew how to take advantage of this when I stayed at their house. They played "the shack of horror" with me. They made me ride the "ghost train." I remember being so terrified of a haunted house my father took me to as a child that he had to spend an hour promising he'd never take me to such a thing again. And let's not even talk about the week of lost sleep for both my mother and I when my hippie babysitter Cinnamon took me to see "Fright Night" without permission.

But, after a certain point I got over the brunt of the fear so that the dark and strange sounds and other things that go creep or bump or scratch in the night did not terrify me. But I think a little pocket of it just crept back in while I was sick. And once you let in one terrifying thought, it's hard to hold out the rest. I started thinking of that movie The MothMan Prophecies...God that movie messed me up! That scene where the phone rings, and you know it's his dead wife, and he desperately wants to answer it...or the scene where he goes to that guy's house who claims he keeps showing up each night, and one day finds him dead in his backyard. Yikes! And that horrible remake of Frankenstein with Deniro and Helena Bonham Carter...the scene where her head is sewn onto the other woman's body...oh the images! So I didn't sleep very well last night to say the least.

But I am okay today. I really am. The demons seem to have fled. I feel almost normal, my creativity has returned. I have written 40 new pages of my novel since coming home!! Yes, many of them will need savage re-writing, but I am very pleased with myself. I may have shirked other more financially-sure projects, but I am finishing this novel! I totally can see the end, and...AND...one of my characters just revealed a most surprising detail to me today as I wrote. I did not know this about her...but it made perfect sense as soon as the words came out of her lips. The most unlikely of my characters had an unconsummated love affair that tortures her almost as much as her big secret, which I cannot reveal here.

Other than that, it's painfully hot. Okay, so it's not east coast humid, but still, it's a kind of strict heat that punishes the will out of you, like a drill instructor. It's heat that makes you do push-ups at three in the morning. Heat that bangs pots and pans in your ears. And I've eschewed a cup now, I'm just drinking my favorite bubbly water straight from the bottle.

Oh, and I got to see the galley proof of my article running in The Writer magazine in September. So cool! My byline nice and easy to read. My article running on three pages with a juicy pull-out quote and sidebars. It's so cool I can't stand it! I want MORE!

Oh and I must thank Steve Almond for turning me onto the band Smoosh. Wow. They're just babies. I can't imagine what they will be like in a few years.

More soon.
JPR