I tumble out of bed...

I have a strange desire to do

A) a micro version of MaNoWriMo

(like, not even the 30k mini version, but, like. Average of 100 words/day as a primary goal -- yes, that's only 3000 in the month, and I used to be able to do that in a day, but that's more fiction than I've written all year -- with 10k as a secondary goal (333) and 30k as a tertiary (1k/day). Or maybe 10k as the primary goal? I don't know.)

B) that is a remix of Disney beauty and the beast

(not with lyrics and shit, and I could just do a regular batb retelling, but I kind of want to take the Disney specific stuff, gaston and the west wing and the specific castle staff, and play with it and make it better. A few elements of the live version but mostly based on the animated one.)

(which is for one thing ridiculous because Disney version, and for another thing cheating for nano because pre-existing story, and for a third feels lazy and cop-out-ish and why would anyone read a 10k-word retelling of a fucking Disney movie, and all the rest of the bullshit that my inner critic likes to dump in my head whenever I want to do something)

I definitely don't want to nano the disabled-beauty/autistic?-beast story-of-my-heart, because it's too important for Nani treat,net, and I need something that means less. But.

Stupid idea? Good idea? Shut up and go back to crocheting?

One of my dreams last night evoked a feeling that I have been trying all day to remember, with very little success.

I don't remember the imagery from the dream -- something about coming home after a war, something about the I-character being a prince -- but it's not the imagery I care about. It's the emotion. I can't remember. It was partly like -- oh, I don't know, like a newly crowned (and mostly still school aged) King Peter coming howm to Narnia after his first battle as king; it had elements of Harry returning to Hogwaets after winning some external tournament for Gryffindor (why Gryff in particular and not Hogwarta as a whole I don't know, and the not that sticks out was people back at the castle waiting, like in a Greek myth, to see which color sails adorn the ship, so someone could run back with news of the winner, which makes no sense in a world with magic, but again the visuals don't matter.

And I can't quite remember the emotion.

I think -- in the way you can sometimes remember the shape of a word without remembering the word itself -- it had the shape of a sort of nostalgia, like coming back as an adult to places you frequented as a kid (and things are so much more small and ordinary when you see them with adult eyes). But also a bit of ... deliberate loss? Of having gone to do the thing knowing you'd be changed by it and knowing that you'd never get innocence back, watching kids be kids and being unable to join in because you know too much. And some element of disconnect, like you've been off fighting a battle in Faerie and return triumphant to find that a hundred years have passed overnight and they're really quite happy that you won but you don't know them because they're the great-grandchildren of your baby brother or whatever, and you can't get the missing years back.

Those are the pieces I can remember, but ... echoes, not the source. It's more than that and *I don't remember*. And the more I try, the less I grasp.

I realised yesterday that the Unbelievable Truth has been back on Radio 4 and I still haven't listened to any of it. That probably doesn't sound very interesting as a realisation, but it's because my listening habits have completely changed over the past five years. ( I seem to have written a short essay about this - mostly only interesting to me, I suspect! The short version is that I now listen almost exclusively to podcasts, rather than live radio )

There isn't really a conclusion to this, but it's really surprised me to realise how far away from radio I've moved in quite a short time, given what a central role it used to play in my day to day experience, especially given that it wasn't prompted by any change in the technology - podcasting's been around for ages. What next, I wonder.