Crazy Dreams

As long as I can remember, I have had dreams about crashing airplanes. Never as a passenger, but always as an observer on the ground. Although the time and place differ, the circumstances are nearly always the same. Something directs my attention at the sky. Sometimes, it is another person, most often it is the sound of a low-flying airplane in a place where such a thing is unusual. I then see the plane in the sky, flying very low. Sometimes it is obvious that there is trouble, but most often the plane simply is flying too low. Then it crashes. What happens after that is more variable, but one thing is consistent. The utter feeling of dread that pervades the entire dream. The feeling generated by the low rumble of background music in a horror film. The feeling that something terrible is about to happen and I have no power to do anything about it. I usually immediately head out to try and help the victims, but the dream always moves on and I never make it there. Instead I begin having other adventures, every so often remembering that I was trying to get to the crash site to help the victims and feeling frustrated at whatever it is that keeps distracting me.

Last night I had one of these dreams. It was unique in that it was very clear and I remembered many details the next morning, but followed the same pattern. I was travelling down a country road in Texas. I don't remember how I knew it was Texas, just that it was near the place I used to live. I don't recognize the road, but that is what my mind was telling me. Someone in the car with me pointed out two helicopters up in the sky which appeared to be chasing each other. One was marked as a TV news chopper, and the other was marked as a Navy chopper. (Oddly enough, their paint jobs were very similar in color and design, but one had the call sign of a TV station on it, and the other said: US Navy.) We watched them for a while, until we saw two Coast Guard choppers approaching as if to assist the Navy chopper in chasing the news chopper. It was then that we noticed that the sky was filled with aircraft of all kinds, all circling around in seemingly random directions. Then we saw one that was clearly in distress. (I think we also heard on the radio or something that an airplane was circling the airport because its landing gear would not go down. It is not clear how I understood this.) The airplane was performing increasingly haphazard maneuvers, flipping upside down and finally diving towards the ground. This time, unlike many of my crash dreams, I saw the impact and the fireball. I stood on the side of the road with a large crowd of people watching in horror, and heard the sound of the debris whistling through the air at us. We all started to run, searching for some cover. I remember trying to get down behind the road bed for shelter, but kept moving on to find better shelter because I did not feel safe. Debris was hitting the ground all around me, but none hit me or any of the others with me. Finally, it seemed to be over and people started picking up the pieces. I was very insistent that nobody touch anything, since the investigators would want to find the pieces exactly where they lay. I even yelled at a few people who were collecting pieces of debris. Then, the investigators came along and were just picking up the debris and throwing it into a wagon. I remember feeling a bit foolish for having made such a big deal about leaving it in place.

From there, the dream wandered off in another direction that was much more incoherent and my memory has already faded. I have always wondered precisely how significant our dreams are, and whether they are related to our everyday lives. Sometimes I am sure that they are just the random firings of brain cells recharging themselves during sleep. Other times it feels as if they must be some kind of message from the subconscious. Maybe a combination of both is closer to the truth.

Regardless, if any of the people who stumble across this have any expert knowledge of dreams wants to express their opinions, that would be great. Or, if you have no expert knowledge, but want to share your completely uninformed opinion, that would be interesting too.


© 2009 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

Springtime is...was here.

Monday was a beautiful day. I came home from work to find all of the kids out front playing in the cul-de-sac with the other neighborhood kids. They were all getting along for a change, and I decided to relax on the porch and watch them. The warm sunshine on my face just felt good!

I love spring, the winter is dark, depressing, and cold. The summer is just too hot to want to be outside. And fall just means that it will be dark and depressing soon. Spring is the season of expectations, anticipation, refreshment, and renewal. In the spring, you are still amazed to see the daffodils appear suddenly on a brown bank of dead grass alongside the highway, or pink hyacinths blooming before you were even aware of them poking through the ground. One day you realize that the lawn needs to be mowed, and unlike later in the summer you feel a surge of excitement to do the job. In springtime you WANT to be outside, to hear the birds singing, to smell the fresh breeze, to lay on the trampoline and look at the stars in the night sky.

Then, Tuesday morning I scraped a thin layer of ice off of my windshield. Drat! Winter is back!

Testing...Testing...1...2...

Perhaps you have noticed, this is a new blog. It is not my first however. (It is my second - if that makes any difference...) My first was on Yahoo 360. For those of you fortunate enough to have never heard of 360, it is Yahoo's attempt to break into the Social Networking scene. (I should have said: Yahoo's miserably failed attempt...) When I decided that the Internet could not live another moment without another blog, I set mine up on Yahoo 360. Why? Because.

Now, for pretty much the same reason, I have decided to move to Blogger. (Or Blogspot, or Google, or whatever this place is...)

What to do with the 50 or 60 blog posts that I left back on 360? Not sure. I tried bringing them here, but Yahoo does not seem too eager to make that easy for me. So for now, I will just provide a link here to the old place, and invite you to wander back over there and check them out. You might find something interesting, then again you might just decide that I deserve to remain eternally, an aspiring writer only.

Either way, thanks for stopping by!

http://360.yahoo.com/tweetywill

My 35th Birthday

I am not too worried about birthdays. They come whether you are excited about them or not. Now that I am a father, I understand the importance of them to my kids, and they get plenty of attention on their birthdays. Having been married for a dozen years now, I too pay an appropriate amount of attention to my wife's birthday. But my own birthday, I don't really get too excited about.

My wife on the other hand...

Yesterday was my 35th birthday. Thanks to some excited utterances from the younger kids (and a cofirming disgusted outburst from one of the older ones...) I knew that my wife had some gifts stashed away somewhere. She had asked me where I wanted to go out for dinner, so I knew that was in the works as well. Other than that, it looked to be just another day at work. Answering phone calls, e-mails, wishing I could punch printers that simply refuse to act rational. So when I checked my e-mail and saw a Happy Birthday wish from my wife's cousin Tina, I was a little bit baffled. How did she know it was my birthday? Weird... But there is a rational explanation, my wife's family has a talent for remembering birthdays. That must be it. Then I got a call from my friend and co-worker Vic. He wanted to wish me a Happy Birthday too! How did Vic know it was my birthday? I questioned him, asking how he knew, but he just claimed to have known. Another friend an co-worker named Tyler was in my office and overheard this conversation and wished me a Happy Birthday too. What is going on?

I like to keep my birthday quiet. It kind of unnerves me when people wish me Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, Happy Saint Patty's day, or anything else. Not that I am irritated or insulted, I just don't really know how to respond. I also don't like the spotlight too much, and widespread knowledge of an impending birthday tends to focus that spotlight much too tightly around me. So I respond as I usually do, with thanks and a sudden effort to change the subject.

The next e-mail came from my mother-in-law. No surprise there really, I got her birthday card a week or two ago along with the usual Valentine's Day package for the kids. Nevertheless, it still put a smile on my face. Then I got the first phone call. My good friend Erika called from work to wish me a Happy Birthday, even though she had already sent an e-mail and text message the day before. (Like my wife and her family, Erika has that Birthday remembering talent!) It was great to hear her voice, but I did wonder why the second contact. Then another e-mail, this time an e-card from Barry and Paula, our friends from church. Now I am REALLY getting perplexed.

I strongly suspect my wife has done SOMETHING to cause this landslide of Birthday wishes. What it was yet I do not know.

Then phone calls from two friends from way back in Washington state. First Andrea called. I must confess that I interrogated her at length about how she knew it was my birthday. She was a great sport though, and it was good to hear from her too. Shortly after that my good buddy Slim. (Everyone else in the world calls him Kurt. I prefer Slim. He calls me The Doc.) It is really good to hear the voice of one of my heroes and catch up on things, if only for a few minutes. Then my friend from Texas, the good Doctor Jason sent an e-mail. It is at this point that I am really beginning to enjoy the flood of good will. I can't reveal my source, but by now I know what has happened.

My wife hacked into my gmail address book and sent a message out to what seems like hundreds of friends, family and acquaintances telling everyone that it was my birthday, and asking for at least 35 Happy 35th Birthday wishes. (Who knew Emily had hacking skilz?) All day long my blackberry kept buzzing and ringing as e-mails and calls poured in and I was reminded of all the wonderful people I have had the blessing of being acquainted with over the years.

My little brother the Accountant reminded me that I was 7/20th of a century old now, my big brother the Linguist had his phone call stolen by the interference from the Metro. My psycho sister-in-law and her fy-an-see sent greetings. The Stringham's sent their best wishes. The Sister missionaries called to sing Happy Birthday in beautiful harmony. Shauna emailed the secret of true happiness (which we would LOVE to comply with, if only it didn't mean moving to Canadia...) The Grolls wrote a very amusing if somewhat inaccurate poem. At dinner, Dad called from work and on the way home I got calls from Stephen, Ammon, and Michael, my super-nephews.

Back at home I found a very wonderful card on the door from the Conovers that made me want to cry... (Usually only Rudy or the Return of the King can do that to me!) There were two messages on the phone, one from someone who spoke very quietly but called me Uncle Tyler and one from Grandma Francis. (Who called and missed three other times that night before finally reaching me about 11:00!) More emails continued to roll in, from Marty the Sailor man and the Clan McArthur back in Texas. Then Lnnnnnnrd called but couldn't talk much while haulin' triples. Little Tyler, my young teenage hero sent his greetings, and then I spoke with his Mom, which is where he inherited his heroic qualities.

Depending on how you total it up, I got anywhere from 39 to 50 birthday wishes. When I woke up yesterday morning, I would have been hard pressed to name 39 to 50 people who cared enough to wish me a Happy Birthday. Not that I don't think I have any friends, I just tend to get wrapped up in my own little world sometimes and forget how blessed with family and friends I am. Without a doubt, this was one of my best birthdays ever. My gift was more than just a flood of birthday wishes, it was a reminder of how many good people there are in my life and how my life has been touched by so many good people.

For everyone who took the time, and everybody who would have taken the time if they could, I want to say a heartfelt thanks. You have made not only this one birthday better, but in some way have enriched my life and made me a better person.

And for my beautiful companion: Thank you. For being obsessed with birthdays, for forgiving me seventy times seven times, and for believing in me.

Now I have got to start remembering people's birthdays!

© 2009 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

I'm Famous! Well, Sort of...

I got a story published! It's a non-paying gig, for a free online e-zine called The Piker Press but it is an actual, real gig!It is a story titled: The Prisoner. It was originally a short story that I wrote in Junior High. Then when I discovered NaNoWriMo I took it as an idea for my novel. I was able to stretch it out to over fifty thousand words, but not without losing the real heart of the story and adding a whole lot of dirty wordcount tricks! Then, when a good friend suggested I submit something to the Piker Press a few weeks ago, I decided to get it out and dust it off a bit. I chopped at it mercilessly, down to novella size and submitted it.And they liked it! They really liked it!So it will be published as a serial for the next few weeks, each new edition of the Press comes out on Monday. So if you like my stuff, here is a chance to see my first real published story!

Hooray!

Monday November 17, 2008 - 05:46pm (EST)

NaNoWriMo 2008 - Day One...

(Image is the symbol of the SSWD, created by me...)
Tiriak woke with a start.
So begins my latest NaNo novel. Not as impressive as I tend to want my first lines to be, but I had to start somewhere. I sat there in the IHOP, at a table with about ten other NaNovelists and realized that although I had a pretty good idea about where I wanted my story to go, I was nowhere near deciding where to begin. Should I begin with the vision that my MC Tiriak has on his coming-of-age vision quest? Or should I begin earlier, in his childhood with a little bit of character development? Should I begin with some background on the antagonists the Soul-Stealing Weasels of Despair? Or should I shoot right to the action and fill in the rest as flashbacks?
I decided that the vision quest is really where the story begins, so I will start there but that is no guarantee that I won't change my mind later. That of course is the beauty of NaNoWriMo: I can just write what comes into my head and then go back and fill in the blanks later.
For November anyway, only the wordcount matters. After one day, I am at 3,352 words. Not a bad beginning!
Happy Novelling!
Saturday November 1, 2008 - 10:40pm (EDT)

© 2008 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

NaNoWriMo 2008!

It's that time again... Carpal tunnel irritating, sleep depriving, frustration generating, plot ninja creating, write-in attending, flickguy tormenting, 50,000 words in 30 days.
For some reason the first thing people ask when I tell them I write a novel every November is whether or not they get published. I always laugh out loud. Mostly because the dreck that I pound out to make sure I keep up with the minimum 1667 words per day would not be good enough to paper a birdcage if you printed it out on gold foil. That is what happens when you turn off the inner editor, focus more on quantity than quality, and just enjoy telling yourself a story. Characters wander around and refuse to stick to the script. Plot bunnies and ninjas drop in out of nowhere to create great gaping plot holes, and to get you out of them. You have long rambling conversations between characters about random topics having nothing to do with your story, just to meet your daily wordcount goal.
At the end of the month, you are so sick of these disobedient children and their interminably dull conversations that you upload the words to the NaNoWriMo word counter to get your cheesy downloadable certificate, and then you save it to some dusty corner of your hard drive and hope to never see it again. And you tell everyone how much fun it was. Because it was. You accomplished something. It may have been silly, it may have been useless, and you will most likely never see your name on the bestseller list. But you did it! And that is the entire point.

Friday October 31, 2008 - 09:02am (EDT)


© 2008 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved