The three-hundred ring circus of my brain.

I just had an incredibly vivid and intense dream, a dark fantasy mashup of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Boiling Rock, and The Shawshank Redemption.  Two people, unjustly imprisoned, and a justly imprisoned assassin who only allowed itself captured to fulfill a contract on the inside, were my perspective characters.  The two unjustly imprisoned people seemed to be Damarhis from The Hellion Prince and Claire Bennett from Heroes, snd unfortunately post-dream amnesia has lead me to forget the details of Claire's plotline that made some sort of waking-world sense.

Damarhis, on the other hand, spent his time ingratiating himself to the Warden.  While horrible burn-victim assassin One-Who-Hates was slowly decimating the population, Damarhis volunteered to help clean up the bodies.  This allowed him brief access to their personal affects and to the incinerator chamber.  What was more difficult was the process of assembling, one by one, the components of not one but two separate poisons -- one a typical prison recipe, a moonshine cocktail that is used for suiciding; the other familiar to anyone who's read or watched Romeo and Juliet.   Gargling and spitting out the first toxin, which had a distinctive aroma and appearance, he then swallowed the second and dropped into a very carefully timed catatonic state.  Waking in the incinerator shortly before it was scheduled to be lit, he would clamber out, find where he had concealed an outfit that could pass from a distance as a guard uniform, and brazenly walk out in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately, still weak from poison, he emerged from the incinerator to find the prison on lockdown and all guards on active duty -- because One-Who-Hates had gotten out of its cell, somehow.

I know that, in the dream, Claire's convoluted escape plan was supposed to have some serendipitous confluence with this plotline that permitted  mutual escape or mutual capture, but the details have gone, and the final sequence of the dream went awry.  When I have dreams this narratively coherent, they tend to play out in several 'takes,' as though they are being filmed, with the details asjusted a little more every time.  Unfortunately for me in the last 'take,' Claire's escape became very intuitive and mystical, leaving Damarhis to deal with One-Who-Hates all on his own.

So.  Now I'm up.

Worst holiday ever.

Just a random note that while I enjoy joke LJ entries on April 1st, I take about as well to being directly pranked as, say, a badger might.  A rabid badger.  Played by Paul Bettany.

On an absolutely serious note, Chapter Eleven will be going up within 24 hours, and Chapter Twelve will probably go up on Tuesday.

Chapter Thirteen will go up before May, but apart from that I promise me no promises.

As of today, I have written more than 40,000 words of fiction this year.  That may be more than I wrote during the entirety of last year (hard to be sure, since at some point I lost track of my wordcount).

This excites me.