In the dream, there were an awful lot of people milling about, in what started off as my home but turned into some sort of hotel. It took me a while to realize they were mostly writers. They were all making elaborate representations of the plot and structure of their novels--huge sheets of paper, colored pencils and detailed illustrations that were works of art of their own, each writer's schematic different, but all of them--extensive. Complicated.

I thought of my own books, which I just sort of jump in and write, without building anything like this sort of scaffolding first, and I felt strange. A little disconnected.

"Wow," I said to these unknown writers. "You're all way more structure based than me."

No one answered me. No one looked up from their work.

"Who are you all, anyway?" I tried instead. "Did you go to Clarion together? Writers of the Future?"

"No," someone told me. "This is just a professional development day." Turns out this particular group of writers had been getting together once a month, pretty much forever, to work on their stories. The rest of the dream devolved into a discussion about the great rates they got on the hotel, which was somewhere in Phoenix.

Pretty mild, as writing-related anxiety dreams go. And in retrospect, it seems worth remembering both that I had no desire to reach for the paper and colored pencils myself--and that no one suggested that I should.