lunchtime ramble

I'm sitting in my office eating a bowl of raw veggies drizzled with fig-infused vinegar, giving my busy brain a five-minute break from work by checking out some blogs I recently bookmarked. Like this one. And this one. Somehow they make my soul breathe a little sigh of relief, and keep me going through the rest of the crazy afternoon. You know why I think that is? Reading blogs such as these is like looking through a secret peephole into the mysterious creative lives of these strangers. It's a breath of fresh air in the monotony of my office job. (Not that I don't love my job. I do. But lately I've been REALLY craving more time for me and my personal wants/needs/desires.) If there were a color printer at work I could use, I would print some of the pictures from those blogs and tape them onto my office walls so I could be surrounded by that feeling all day.
On a slightly more down-to-earth note, I'm about 26,500 words through my YA superhero fiction. Which isn't nearly as far as I wanted to be, come June. But hey, at least I'm sitting down to write almost every day. At least there's progress. And even if I don't finish it by the end of June (which I'm still aiming for, by the way), this will still be the fastest I've ever turned out a draft. I also had most of a short story show up in my head on Sunday, which was a pleasant surprise, so I'm partway through writing that.
I dreamed last night that my sister J and I, along with quite a few other women, were trapped in this asylum-type place. We fled one day from our captors at the asylum, and on our way through the grounds, our captors began throwing things at us. They caught J in the side and she was bleeding awfully but we all managed to make it to this huge sprawling university campus. We went into a large building and hid in the rabbit-warren of rooms we found there while someone went to look for a doctor for J. The blood kept coming. And then I too went to look for a doctor and rounded a corner in the building and one of the other women screamed at me. And it startled me so much that I woke up, with a racing heart and panicked gaze in the darkness of my apartment.
There are books to write about, and I know I owe you a long post about BEA, but neither of those things are happening right now. Right now I will eat the rest of my veggies and wander dreamily through another blog or two, then get back to the (enormous) pile of work on my desk. More blogging to come soon, I promise.