First, I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. I dreamed I was a superhero. I still haven’t figured out what my superpower was, but I got a call on the bat phone to hightail it to a sleepy little Texas border town to take out The Black Widow. My sidekick went with me. He was tall, balding and had a pot belly. Yeah, we made quite a team, but for some reason that was part of our power. Everyone underestimated us.

The Black Widow and I were old archrivals and we recognized each other immediately when our glances met across a smoky cantina. (There was a little homoerotic tinge to this whole dream.) She looked like Natalie Whatshername from Sugarland. A tall, blonde, natural beauty, with whom I’m sure I would have wanted to be friends if she didn’t have a nasty habit of romancing a victim in a bar then sucking off his head. Not a sexual euphemism.

Anyway, we got into a huge battle where we threw tables and chairs at each other from across the room, then took the battle out into the street and demolished half the buildings there. Neither of us won an advantage, and when we got tired of beating on each other, we headed back to the cantina for a beer, my trusty sidekick complaining about his aching back all the while. When she rose to leave, she handed me her lighter and said, “Keep it. I’m quittin’ anyway.”

I smiled and thanked her, but as soon as she was out the door, I gingerly held up the lighter, walked out the back of the cantina, tossed it into the garbage bin and ducked to avoid the explosion. End of dream.

My report is very anticlimactic. And it looks very different from what I had planned last week, but unexpected things crept up all week. Not that I can talk about all of it just yet.

* I wrote class material for FFnP’s Logline, Premise, Query and Synopsis class which starts tomorrow.
* I spoke with my Berkley editor about edits she wants on the first Viking book, then received the file and started work on that.
* I received word that Four Sworn was accepted and is tentatively scheduled for release by Samhain in September.
* I wrote a synopsis for a Merry Kinkmas short story for Ellora’s Cave and shipped it to my editor, after conducting some rather thorough fetish research.
* I received some exciting news about a project for an epublisher, but can’t mention it yet.
* And I quick-plotted a short story for Cleis.

This week:
* I will plow through edits of Viking-1.
* I will complete planning for Viking-2 and start writing the sucker!
* I will begin work on my Cleis short story.
* And lastly, I hope to begin work on my next western for Samhain.

Have a Happy 4th! I’ll think about you while I’m here on the lake!