I went to sleep two nights ago anticipating submitting a portion of my novel to a publishing agent and that anxiety carried over into my dreams it seems.
For some strange reason, i was in a packed auditorium, sitting in a middle row, preparing to give a talk about writing (ha!), when said agent threw open the auditorium doors and ran over to me, tapping her watch, saying, "Hey, don't forget to meet with me at 12:15!" I looked at her like she was obsessed with me (I am even arrogant in my dreams) and I said, "Yeah. I know. Bye." She looked at me like she didn't believe I was going to show up and then she just suddenly wasn't there anymore. So I got to the podium, and it turns out I was there so that people from the audience could read sentences to me from their own works and have me point out how very stupid everything they had written was. One girl in the audience thought I was hilarious up there and as I was walking down the steps from the podium she asked if she could walk me to my car. I told her yes, forgetting that I wasn't going to my car, and as I opened the drivers' side door, she kissed me. Yeah. So we stood there kissing (I hate kissing, for the record), and suddenly I looked at my watch (I don't even wear watches) and it was precisely 12:34. And I said, "Shit! Hurry up and finish kissing me, I've gotta go!" So she hurried up and I started running like a maniac through the campus of wherever I was at and I was asking random people, "Where am I supposed to meet Lauren at?" (That really is the agent's name.) Of course, everyone looks at me like I'm crazy. But one girl who - once I saw her I suddenly realized - had been watching me and that girl make out, gives me a bitchy look and says, "Oh, Lauren's always in the library at this time..." So then I'm running around asking people where the fucking library is. When I find it, the agent is, of course, not there and the librarian starts laughing at me and says, "She never will be! Haha! Whatsherface just told you to come here so that I can tell you to go into that room over there..." I go into the room, duh, and Whatsherface is sitting at a study desk in her bra, making out with the girl I had been making out with earlier. And Whatsherface guffaws and says, "That's what you get, bitch!" And that's the end.
What the fuck, right? Cut to today, when I wake up to a reply email from said agent that says she is sorry but she is no longer a literary agent but it was a pleasure meeting me and she wishes me the best with my novel.
So I was too late. Just like in my dream! I had been agonizing over the synopsis and whether the sample chapters were good enough to send and so I sent it all too late. But what got in my way more than that was the fact that I've been working so god damn much over the last three weeks. I just finished working pretty much 13 days in a row. 9 of those days were evenings when I stayed until midnight or 2 a.m. or later and then had to wake up with my daughter at 6 a.m. So I was drained. Whenever I tried working on my novel synopsis, everything I wrote or thought of sounded infinitely stupid (like the sentences the people in the audience were reading to me) because I was grumpy and I'd have to stop writing an hour before my daughter's nap was even over because I had to start getting ready for work.
We were short-staffed, my friend (who is also my manager) had a family emergency, we were getting ready for a corporate visit, blah blah blah. I had been threatening to quit for weeks but felt obligated to stay just a little bit longer cuz of my friend's emergency; plus the district manager kept begging me to stay - kind of like the bitch in my dream who I was making out with: she was holding me back from what I really should've been doing. My husband said it's like that bitch represented my friend and the district manager. I was too busy doing something with/for her even though I had a nagging feeling that I probably shouldn't have been doing that, and so my opportunity to contact the agent passed. And it's like Whatsherface was the manifestation of a little voice in my head that kept trying to make me quit my job, really quit it not just threaten to. And in the end, the agent who was for sure interested in my book isn't available anymore and that little voice in my head is saying, like in the dream, "That's what you get, bitch!" and is mocking me by making out with that bitch I had spent so much time making out with, as though saying, "Isn't this what you wanted? This is what you fucking chose to do instead of getting in contact with the agent sooner so might as well keep fucking doing it, dumb ass!"