Had a restless night's sleep, full of bad dreams about not being able to get everything done, being late for everything, forgetting tasks or key components of tasks. Coincidentally the next couple of days are going to be really stressful. Lots of rushing around trying to get from one place to another & too many things to keep track of. Gee, my dreams are usually less overt than that, you know, more metaphoric. But then I guess anxiety dreams are generally literal like that. I used to have bad dreams about dead air on the radio all the time.
At least they weren't all like that. I woke up to a strange dream in which I learned that most genre fiction is written "mad lib" style: the authors write everything except the nouns, which the publishers fill in so they can publish the same books over and over. This was told to me by a big name fan of fantasy/sf (not a real person, but in my dream he ran a major fantasy website) who was trying to stop this trend and get back to each book being written individually.
I asked him how it was possible that books could be written like this, and he gave an example where an author had created a complicated fictional variation on a bow and arrow, which was interchangeable with either a sword or a gun in terms of functionality. That way her books (or book templates I guess) could be re-used for almost any era or level of technology. I thought to myself that this seemed like more work than just writing each book as a one-off.
(I know where this dream came from too, at least the madlib part: Kip_W's hilarious Dennis Miller Mad Lib.)
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