Interviews, Tarot Readings, and Crazy Dreams...

Hey everyone!

As the first part of the title explains, my interview with The Pen & Muse Blog has been posted. Yay! Click here if you'd like to read it. It was so surreal sitting at my laptop, filling out an interview questionnaire. It kind of made me wonder if someday I'll be doing this regularly. Making the rounds online doing blog tours and other promotional stuff for my writing career...

All-in-all, this entire experience went completely differently than I had ever thought it actually would. Sure, I had those random, daydreaming moments where I could see myself winning... but then reality would kick in. It would remind me that no only am I an unpublished author (even though everyone in my category would be too...), but I had also never submitted anything before. Yup, this was the first writing contest that I had the nerve to enter.

To make this situation even more surreal, actual published authors have been congratulating me both on the interview site as well as on my blogs. Part of me is fully convinced that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and this will all have been a dream. I get up each morning and double check my email just to make sure that I wasn't dreaming this all up.

Hey! I have an overactive imagination. This situation would be nothing for me to dream up... but I guess that overactive imagination is the reason that I'm here...

I know why I'm here. I'm here to write. Not because I want to, but because I have to- not that I don't enjoy it, because I really do. Coming back to writing only made me realize that I was missing a very vital part of my life before. Writing is truly my passion and I can't imagine ever giving it up again. And if my tarot reading, given by the amazing Karen Mahoney, is any indication... I'd better not give it up! As part of her blogiversary, Karen performed 50 tarot readings (simple three card spreads) for people who left comments on her blog. I was able to get in before the cut off and asked for a reading having to do with my writing. Here's what the cards told her:

"So a general reading about your writing:

The Moon, Princess of Cups, 9 of Pentacles.

The Moon is an interesting and powerful card. It highlights creativity and imagination - you are filed with ideas right now and you are possibly confused about which roads to explore. The Moon says you need to explore as much as possible, because only by doing that will you find out for sure which is the right path for you. You might have some particularly vivid dreams (or just plain weird ones!) in the coming weeks - take note of those you remember, because even *they* might hold the seeds of more ideas you can write about. :) You might want to try writing something you've never tried before. Sometimes this card indicates mystery, so perhaps a story with a real mystery at its heart?

The Princess of Cups, in this context, backs up the rush of ideas you are already having - or will soon have. She also says that writing fiction for children could be a good thing to explore. Cups also = romance, so you should do well with romantic themes, whether in YA or not. The 9 of Pentacles confirms that writing is your calling - this is a wonderful, fertile card. You will one day make money from writing, so stick with it no matter what stage you're at right now. Work hard and you will be rewarded."

The really cool thing? I have been having amazingly, vivid dreams lately. Some have been really sweet and are ideal scenes for YA novels with a romance element to them, while others have been of the creepy, mystery sort. I've been bombarded with inspiration from everywhere the past few weeks and have, at times, struggled to outline it all and store it in my TBW (To Be Written) folder on the laptop. One dream in particular keeps me wondering what would've happened if I hadn't woke up when I did.

It was night and I was with a group of people wondering, lost through a gigantic mansion of sorts. There was an older gentleman with white hair, a woman in her mid thirties with red hair and wearing a lime green suit dress, two teenagers (a boy and a girl, both wearing punk-style clothes and hairstyles), and myself. It was dark in the hallway we were in and we were following tracks on the ceiling because, for some reason, we were certain that they would lead us where we needed to go.

At one point a glowing, red, crystal skull suspended from a metal rod appeared along the track and we followed it. The older gentleman tripped and we all stopped to help him. When we turned around not only was the skull gone, but we realized that we were at a T-intersection where the tracks went both straight ahead along the path we had been following, but also down a hallway to our right. I'm not sure why, but the teenaged girl had a piece of chalk, so we made a mark on the wall and turned right. We could've followed the path straight and stayed at the outer perimeter of the mansion, but the woman in the green suit said we should go right, so we did. We left the security of seeing the outside world through the large windows in the original hallway and ventured inward.

Looking out the windows before, we could tell that we were on an island of some sort and that the mansion was built on a cliff face, well, at least this side of it was. Looking down all we could see were crashing waves and jagged rocks in the moonlight. We ended up in a gigantic atrium (I'm talking professional football field sized, gigantic). The ceiling was rounded and towered stories and stories above us. We could just barely make out the stars and clouds in the night sky through a holographic image of the world that was projected on the ceiling. There were symbols on different countries that would occasionally blink or change color before disappearing. This room was full of people and everyone was certain that we were at the end of our journey, that this was our treasure. And, to be fair, it was a pretty amazing room. Food, music, well-dressed people there for an amazing party ... it was magnificent.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the glowing, red skull zipping along the perimeter of the room as it headed toward another small hallway that would normally have been overlooked. I stood there wondering if I should follow. If this room- this party was our reward, then the skull should've stayed here, right? Was there a greater reward if we kept following? Was it a trap, meant to punish those too greedy to appreciate what they have?...

Then I woke up... and unlike my normal dreams, this one didn't pick up where it left off the next night. I guess I'll never know what happened...

Oh well, maybe now that I've actually typed up the dream, it'll finish tonight? It's late and I'm tired, still getting over the flu, so I'm going to end my blog here for the night and head to bed.

Until I blog again...
Talk 2ya later...

~Willow