Since Dreamer is my newest release, the longest thing I've ever written that didn't totally suck, and the only thing I've submitted for publication not in response to a specific submission call, I'm going to ramble on about that one first. :)
I write really well in response to prompts. I write really poorly when I have to devise everything myself. I hadn't written anything in ages that I liked when, thanks to a circuitous route that involved lots of clicking on other people's links, I suddenly stumbled upon the 100wordwars community on livejournal just over a year ago. The premise of the community is simple: pick a prompt (usually three or four words, sometimes a picture) and write exactly one hundred words in response. It was perfect for me. When I look at a set of words, they sort of bring themselves together in my head with very little effort. My only real task was in choosing which one hundred words were most important. When I got to prompt #9 ("oil, unseen, touch"), I immediately thought of a dream and wrote:
The images in his mind shifted and shimmered like oil on
water, swirling with every turn of his eyes.
Unseen fingers ghosted over the side of his neck, the inside of his
elbow, the arch of one foot. Suddenly
his vision went dark as though his eyes had involuntarily closed and were now
locked shut without a key. Warm breath
touched the shell of his ear, stirred the hair at the back of his neck. Goosebumps shivered down the length of his
spine. He arched back against solid
warmth. A chuckle rippled through the
darkness. “Goodnight, lovely
dreamer. Welcome back.”
My friends in the community immediately commented with curious inquiries, mainly along the lines of "What next? Who is it? What's happening?" So I wrote prompt #10 ("laughter, bubbles, slipping"):
He was racing naked across an endless Slip ‘n Slide, his laughter
mixing with the chuckles of the man chasing him. Bubbles squelched under his slipping feet,
lifted into the air by the quickness of his pace, bursting wet and sticky
against his damp skin. The fragrance of
sandalwood hung heavy in the air, almost cloying despite the openness of the
grassy field and the gentle breeze playing across it. He ached to stop running, turn, and finally
see his lover’s face, but his legs would not stop. A tear washed soap from an eye; he could not
tire here.
Falling asleep had become a mixture of
horror and relief. He could not decide
if he wanted to stay awake forever or sleep endlessly, never to regain
consciousness. All night long, every
night, Morpheus held him teetering on the brink of something vast and
terrifyingly beautiful, like a fierce samurai softly caressing his katana. He was trapped in a world of shifting beauty
and delight, yet never his to control, never his to choose. He did not know if Morpheus would ever let
him tumble over the edge, nor if falling would lead him to endless light or
fathomless dark.
The second source of inspiration came from a quote at the end of a chapter in JL Merrow's Pricks and Pragmatism. The main character has just given a copy of the movie A Bout de Souffle, and he mentions the line, "It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're sleeping together, you're all alone." I read it, pondered it, and wondered to myself, "Well, what if that weren't true?"
Suddenly I had a story. I wrote something like 35 more hundred word prompts and then strung them together one night when I got bored; I decided I might as well write the whole thing out. So I did. And then, somewhat to my surprise, I liked it where it went. I liked who Jonah turned out to be. I even liked inventing a dreamworld, which was a real shock--I don't normally like fantasy much, so it was certainly not anything I'd imagined myself writing. Then I had a ton of fun playing around with dreams.
Personally, I have incredibly boring dreams (much like Jonah at the beginning of the book) in which absolutely nothing out of the ordinary occurs: I make dinner, I grocery shop, I eat, I take showers, go to work. That's pretty much it. In her introductory philosophy classes, sister often uses me as a counterexample to the argument in Descartes' Fourth Meditation that if the Meditator were just dreaming, he would know it because dreams are unlike real life. Mine are like carbon copies of one another. My husband, on the other hand, dreams as though he's on hallucinogenic drugs. For instance, Jonah's best friend Mike opens the book by describing a dream to Jonah in which a giant Rob Lowe starts jump roping with the road Mike's driving along. That one was actually one of my husband's real dreams. When he describes them to me, I often just sit blinking at him, wondering why he dreams of such wildly bizarre things while I lie two feet away dreaming of making oatmeal. For me, imagining a dream without the usual spatial-temporal-physical boundaries was fascinating.
The other fun part for me was imagining how someone who has only ever seen the world through dreams might imagine it to be. What things might he misinterpret? What things might he have difficulty understanding? There were so many things I didn't even get to address because they didn't fall within the scope of the story, but it was a great mental exercise. I'm sure I got things wrong, probably missed a few things as well, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process.
It was also one of those rare pieces of writing where I got to the end and had no more I wanted to write. I didn't want to write any spin-offs, I didn't want to write any drabbles about the characters in the future... I was content to let them be, sailing off to their HEA on their own, unobserved. To paraphrase Robert Penn Warren, I know they are beautiful forever, and live in a beautiful house, far away. I'm glad they called my name once.
Official blurb:
Jonah considers himself the most boring person in existence. Even his dreams are boring; the most exciting dream he's ever had involved folding laundry. But then, in the middle of a dream about eating cereal, everything changes. Faint memories of an unseen visitor, impressions that vanish upon waking, become dreams that leave Jonah exhausted, afraid, and determined to figure out who is turning his boring dreams into a terrifying game of cat and mouse...
Available from Less Than Three Press.
Print coming soon.
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