So I put the Sir G. in the mail yesterday -- that is, I sent the complete manuscript off to the publisher that wanted to read the complete manuscript.
And now I'm just pretending that I'm not having a nervous breakdown about it. I'm really not good at letting these things go.
I had a dream night before last that James and I had bought a new house, and being worried about the money (nope, no literal meaning there!) decided to renovate the basement so that we could rent it out.
We went downstairs. The basement was bigger than the house, and dug deep, so that the ceilings were 13 or 14 feet high. It was unfinished, with a stone floor and raw lathe and plaster walls. Lattice work of wood beams in the ceiling, strung with cobwebs. Largish windows of rippled glass at the top of the room sent slanting streaks of moted light down through the lattice and into long gallery rooms. It had a distant look, the air amber or honey. It smelled of dust and turned earth. The house was set on a hill, so at the back it the basement let out on an sunken garden, overgrown with ivy and trumpet vine, hung with lanterns of coloured glass.
The dream has stuck with me -- I keeps popping back and wanting to be turned over, even though it's a plotless image of an unlikely place. Knowing that in dreams the house is the body, I tell it to James, who has a funny take on the idea of fixing up your lower half so that some else can live there. And then Wendy, who says that the house is more the self externalized than the body externalized, and the basement is the subconscious. She says I'm looking for my next project.
I hope I find it. But it's good that my subconscious is such a roomy sunny strange place. It makes me feel a bit less bereft.
It sounds rather beautiful, actually. I tend to agree with the next project idea--now you need to fill the basement back up with more stored goods. :)
Thinking of basements always reminds me of the one in my childhood house. My father had built what we called the "fruit room" which had lots of shelves for my mother's canning. It was always lined with colorful jars of cherries, peaches, beans, beets, jams, jellies. It's a nice nostalgic feeling.
This sounds so much more beautiful than the basement of my dreams, which seems to be a combination of all my childhood basements. Mine has offensive shag red carpets and huge fish shaped pillows. Sometimes it's flooded and we all have to hide in the laundry drier, which is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. I'd rather live in your unconscious!