Today is my birthday. Four days ago, my new novel was “born”. This is the closest I’ve ever come to sharing a birthday with a book of mine – so let me tell you a little about this one, and how it came about.
It started, as my stories often do, with a dream. Sort of.
In the mornings, when I report on my often rich and lush and complex dreams, my husband has been heard to mutter “That’s a STORY.” In fact, some of these dreams have been kneaded, baked, made into publishable short stories – or even novels.. A number of times I’ve ‘serial dreamed’ something longer – a story that starts on one night, finds itself too long and complicated to conclude in one sitting, breaks at a convenient point, and picks up where it left off when next my sleeping brain flips that switch. At least one of these dreams actually woke me up out of a sound sleep and sent me off to a computer keyboard, bleary-eyed and only half awake and barely coherent, to type furiously because the story would not be silenced for another minute.
The neighborhood was a quieter last night than I expected on the “observed 4th”. Tonight may be a different story. Neighbors set off the Oregon regulation fireworks, small bright things that don’t shoot up into the sky. We are in drought status here, after all.
