Dream Author's Dreams

I suffer from severe arthritis of the spine, a condition that leads to back pain, difficulty swallowing (when the inflammation blocks the nerves that control swallowing), and other problems. My back is heavily calcified with some disks damaged. I am very sensitive to changes in the weather, especially changes in the air pressure.

I had a fall over a week ago. The fall messed up my right arm from the wrist to the elbow. That was all that hurt at first, but my back started bothering me after a day. There are three areas of pain: from my neck to the base of my shoulder blades and out to the sides; at the base of my rib cage and out to the sides; and in my lower back. After the second day following the fall, I needed pain killers in order to sleep ... until two nights ago.

Last night I slept poorly and had a dream about pain:

This was the point at which I woke. For a moment I was confused because I was feeling pain similar to that I had dreamed about but much less intense. Then I realized it had been a dream.

I recently wrote a story titled "The Bank" that was based on a series of nightmares. I called it a horror story because I would wake up sweating every time I had the dream. Apparently I was wrong. Nobody else could see the horror in some unknown agency having absolute control over one's life. Now I simply call the story a fantasy.

I used to think I knew what a horror story was. After all, my story "Fluffy the Monster Slayer" was a horror, full of blood and gore. It was the tale of a cute little bunny rabbit that started killing people, their pets and some predators, her monsters. Is it the blood and gore that makes for a horror story?

I would have said it was the sense of helplessness. I guess that isn't enough. "The Bank" portrayed helplessness but apparently didn't make the grade as horror. Admittedly it didn't have any blood and gore.

I don't intentionally set out to write horror stories. As usual, I just write down what I dream.

But now I'm curious.

The year is now 2009. Some people expect the world to end in 2012 because a certain calendar will reach its end then.

We are in the 21st century, Kids growing up now don't believe in a time when we had no personal computers, no email, no chat, no Instant Messaging, no forums, no Wikis, no Google, no Facebook. They have always had those things. They have always used those things. They take those things for granted.

I belong to a Creative Writing class for seniors sponsored by OASIS. You only have to be fifty to join OASIS, but that list above basically dates back thirty-five years. A decade ago, I was the only person in the class who used email. Many hand wrote their pieces instead of using a computer. Most used a typewriter. Have you tried to buy a typewriter lately, or get supplies for one, or get one repaired? I may have been the only person in the class who had Weblogs and Web sites.

A decade ago . . . I still use the computer I had then. I've added a couple of extra disk drives and I've doubled its memory. I'm trying to stop using it because it uses Microsoft Windows XP and I'm far from fond of Microsoft. I mostly use a Mac Mini running OS-X that I've had for a few years. Beside me sits a computer I built a few years before getting the Mini; it has removable hard disk drives so that I can swap operating systems and try out new versions of Linux. There are other computers littering my house, waiting their turn to be stripped down, have their hard drives erased and go to the recycling / electronics disposal place. I even still have an old laptop that never had a hard drive and other, older devices with names like Atari and Sinclair / Timex that most people have never heard of. A trail of computer obsolescence dates back thirty-five years to the dawn of personal computers.

My son just turned thirty-five. I remember as he was growing up how hard it was to convince him that he was born before people were first able to own computers of their own. He now sings opera in London but he makes his living designing good Web pages as a contractor. It was a long, hard battle to get him to start writing his own Weblog. I never have managed to get my wife or daughter Blogging. My wife thinks Blogging is evil because I reveal too much personal information to an impersonal world waiting to take advantage of me. My daughter does Facebook instead; she also practices thumb typing on her cellular phone to produce SMS text messages.

To contrast the modern scene, my father grew up on a cattle ranch and spent his early years on horseback in an age when the major forms of rapid transportation were the railroads and steamships. He left the ranch because he was fed up with chasing cattle that wanted to be wild; he joined the Navy and spent several years shoveling coal to keep his warships moving. Then he developed a valuable specialty, helping engineer explosive devices. He spent decades helping the Navy develop a torpedo that would go where it was supposed to go and blow up when it got there.

My father never had a college degree. His education was from a rougher school. When he was doing well enough, he stopped learning.

Oh, he learned to drive a car that started when you turned a key instead of one that required you to step on a starter button on the floor with the same foot you used to control the flow of gasoline to the engine, shifting your foot around to control both functions simultaneously. He learned to use cars with synchromesh gearing that allowed you to down shift without having to double clutch. He even learned to drive a car that had an automatic transmission.

He knew I worked with computers but he didn't know what they were or what I was doing with them.

He didn't read much. He would never have appreciated my Kindle book reader. He watched a lot of television -- broadcast television because there was no cable television then -- and he cooked his own meals and he played solitaire.

He let the world pass him by.

I recently learned that the Pope has started to use YouTube. Queen Elizabeth has been doing so for years now. They aren't allowing the modern world to pass them by.

Even an ancient writer can learn to use modern technology. Almost everybody in my Creative Writing class now uses a computer to write and to send email. I may still be the only one Blogging or creating Web sites. There are still a number of free Weblog hosts and free Web site services, some of them very good.

Every writer should blog, or be prepared to watch the world pass them by.

The first generation Amazon Kindle ebook reader, still less than a year old, is catching on. Even I have one now.

My problem with ebooks has always concerned distribution and rights. The companies distributing the stories go out of their way to make buying books difficult and expensive so their customers will be unable to share among themselves. As a potential author, I don't have much problem with people sharing provided somebody along the way actually buys the book.

In the past, many ebook distribution systems relied on proprietary formats. That presumably restricts sales to those able to produce works using that format, often a single company. I don't want a machine so restricted. At first I thought the Kindle used a proprietary format, so that only Amazon could produce books for it, but a little research showed me that their format is an Open Document format similar to MobiPocket (which the reader will handle like a native format) but with DRM (Digital Rights Management) added. That means that over 10,000 public domain books produced by Project Gutenberg can be downloaded to the Kindle, some of them as collections directly from the Amazon Web site.

Past distribution systems also assumed that once a customer was locked in to a particular, expensive book reader, that customer would pay any price to get books to read on it. It costs almost nothing to produce an ebook compared to what it costs to produce a dead tree book. It is almost a byproduct, free because it was produced as a necessary step in the production of the physical book product. The electronic form of a book should cost less than the physical form, if only because it's cheaper to produce. It is also easier to distribute, so there should be no shipping or handling charges.

Amazon is the first company to get the distribution system right. You can purchase a new book from their Web site, using either your computer or the Kindle itself, and it gets delivered electronically in about a minute through Amazon's WhisperNet system. You can also convert PDF or HTML documents to MOBI format using a free program and download it to your Kindle through its USB port. Or you can send a document in Word, PDF or HTML format to your Kindle as an email attachment and Amazon will convert it to MOBI format for you and send it to you using their WhisperNet system.

Amazon also got the pricing right. The vast majority of new books are available for the Kindle for under ten dollars.

Authors say they get paid better for Kindle versions of their books than for physical copies. Sales are better and the percentage of the selling price they get is better. And the Kindle hasn't really caught on yet.

There are problems with the first generation Kindles. Many of them will not survive even a short fall and the supplied cover fails to retain and protect the machine after a few months of use: the elastic band gets stretched out and becomes insecure. Amazon needs to redesign the cover. If you buy a Kindle, you should seriously consider replacing the Kindle cover with a third party cover.

Electronic ink, the Kindle display medium, is at present available only in monochrome; color would be nice but isn't really necessary for reading books. I'm sure, though, that color displays would be popular and that many people with monochrome Kindles would upgrade if color became available.

The basic Kindle will hold about 200 books. Adding an SD (Secure Digital) memory chip extends this by probably 10,000 books. Counting the individual books included in public domain collections, I probably have over a thousand books on my Kindle right now. Some of the books are pretty large: the Charles Darwin collection includes versions 1, 2, 3 and 6 (the classic) of his "On Species" as well as every other book or study he published. I'm ready. I bought four SD cards. One is in my Kindle, two in my Palm TX case and one in its original plastic holder ... because the Kindle case has no place to store them.

So far, I've had to charge my Kindle about once a week. I'm reading a lot more, too.

I've sent the novel I'm working on to my Kindle. I plan to send the novel whose first draft I just finished, too. Eventually, everything I write should be stored on my Kindle and its SD card.

There are Kindle forums. I've joined a Kindle discussion list run by Yahoo.

The Kindle movement is growing.

I dream vividly.Sometimes I dream the same dream repeatedly, often modifying each new version.

Lately I've been dreaming a story I stopped dreaming about three years ago. It's an old dream with some new twists. I had stopped repeating the dream when I realized I couldn't take it anywhere. I had even started to write down the story line. Now the dream has a basis for new developments thanks to the addition of a simple mechanism, a new character who is seen and heard only by the main character.

The story begins with a traffic accident on a Hollywood freeway that fatally injures the main character, Brian, a writer. The new character, sort of a Grim Reaper, pulls out his spirit, allowing another spirit to take over. This spirit specializes in using the last few seconds of a person's life to commit murder for the Powers. He is supposed to kill somebody and then die. This time he, for the first time in forty thousand years, manages to survive.

He wakes up in the hospital, having become Brian, his host. Waking up is a new experience for him and has never happened before. He has interviews with the police, his doctors and his Grim Reaper accomplice, during which he establishes that he will write the stories of the nearly a thousand people he has used as a vehicle for murder, having failed three hundred times over all.

Brian's brother comes from the family farm in Canada to take Brian home to recuperate. There he begins to write his new stories, which sell spectacularly well. He had been in Hollywood to negotiate with a film studio about producing his first novel as a film and had been trying to convince the studio to employ him as a screen writer on the project, which they refused to do. Now he decides to refuse to sell them the film rights unless he is allowed to control the screen play, planning, instead, to sell his new stories for movies.

When he is able to walk again, Brian drives to New York to talk with his agent. In New York, a stranger who has been fatally injured tries to kill him in the same manner he had been killing people. The attempt falls far short but warns him that the Powers want him dead. He also receives threats from the studio that wanted to film his first novel, who warn him that unless he assigns them the film rights they will make it impossible for him to get any other studio to ever make films of any of his stories. His publisher wants him to tour the country to promote his books. He himself wants to return to the family farm and continue writing.

Other attempts on his life show him the Powers are less powerful than expected. His Grim Reaper associate tries to convince him he has become as powerful, in his own way, as the Powers and should openly oppose them rather than simply trying to avoid their attempts to kill him. Following another crude attempt on his life, Brian meets and begins to romance Grace, an adventure travel writer.

I have a new writing program, StoryMill, that I'm going to attempt to use for some of my stories. It used to be called Avenir. I'm having problems getting started due to a steep learning curve for so powerful a tool and may have to look to a forum for help.

My wife, Delia, promotes the sales of fragrances ... when she is working. She hasn't been employed for the last several months because she broke her back. But in my dream last night she was perfectly healthy and had returned to work.

The various companies Delia works for frequently have new fragrances to promote. Some of them vanish after a very short time in the stores, probably because of lackluster sales. The fragrance companies will sometimes send Delia samples of their new products before they are on the shelves of the stores.

In my dream, Delia had just received a tester for a men's fragrance when she was notified that the fragrance was being withdrawn and would not be sold; she was to dispose of the samples, making sure nothing of the fragrance ever appeared on store shelves.

Being curious, Delia opened one of the containers and tried it out by spraying onto a blotter card, letting it dry and taking a sniff. She thought it smelled masculine and pleasant ... but you can't really tell without spraying it onto a real, live person. She gave me the fragrance and told me to try it out. We were about to go to a local mall, Grossmont Center, so Delia could walk and shop, so I used the new fragrance instead of one of the collection of similar samples she had given me over the years and finished dressing.

At the mall, Delia set out walking briskly, leaving me to follow at my own, much slower, pace. I found I had a new handicap to slow me: women kept stopping me to flirt, becoming increasingly aggressive as time passed. By the time I made it to the food court I was being mobbed. I quickly realized why the fragrance product line was being recalled; this must have happened to somebody else. I briefly considered ducking into a rest room but I doubted that my admirers would fail to follow me inside.

I headed back toward our car. I am a slow walker and by now had a considerable crowd around me, many of them obviously aroused. When I saw Delia approaching, I called out to her to get the car started and to open my door so I could make my escape. Delia, of course, didn't understand what was happening, nor that its cause was the perfume she had given me. She just stood there until I reached her. Then she got mad at me for whatever it was that I was doing. She didn't believe me when I insisted it was the perfume, not anything I had done, that was causing the women around me to start ripping my shirt apart. After all, she was immune to its effects.

I finally got back to the car, got it open and, despite heavy resistance, got in and the door closed. Delia started the engine.

At that point the dream ended.

When I mentioned the dream to Delia, she asked me to write it down and possibly, later, to develop a story around it. I doubt I'll use it for a story but I have written it down.

I haven't posted much here lately. Indeed, I've posted nothing for several months. That's because it's much easier to post to my other Weblogs now that I've switched from Firefox to its brother browser, Flock. Flock makes creating and posting entries easy for my Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga and Movable Type Weblogs. Flock has a decent composer that allows me easy HTML insertion and it's the same composer whether I'm using either of my Windows machines, my Mac or a Linux system, of which I have several.

I can compose for Vox by signing in and going to their composer ... but I can post that composition only to Vox, not to any of my other Weblogs. And the Vox composer, while versatile, is different enough from the Flock composer to slow me down and break my chain of thought.

I used to use a Weblog composing program, w-bloggar, to compose for several different Weblog systems, but I stopped using it and deleted it from my system when I started using Flock. It was available only on Windows systems and I use Windows less and less frequently -- normally only when forced to use it for something else -- even though it's easy enough to switch between my Mac Mini and one of the Windows systems. I had the two on a KVM (Keyboard / Video / Mouse) switch. I'm in the process of replacing the two-way switch with a four-way switch so I can add on my variable computer, the one I can modify to run several Linux distributions or a Windows system by plugging in different hard drives.

I mostly post on LiveJournal because it's my catch-all system. My other systems all have themes. Well, one of the Xanga systems has no theme, but I haven't posted there very much either. I stopped posting to either Xanga account when it became so much easier to post to LiveJournal and several others from one composer that didn't do Xanga: basically the same situation I now face with Vox and the Flock composer. I'll probably go back to preparing Xanga posts -- or sharing LiveJournal posts with my Xanga accounts -- now that I can do so from a single ... source [I was going to say "a single location" but the post could come from any of three physical machines running the same composer / browser].

I would love to see Flock adopt Vox into its family of Weblog systems that I could post to. I'd also like to see them adopt some of the Vox composer features they currently lack without giving up the good stuff like their HTML support. But I play with lots of different systems, if only to compare them, and most people wouldn't need a universal browser composing system. I'm sure the amount of work needed to add one more Weblog format to a composer is much greater than adding the last one was.

Oh, well ... I can dream.

The month of October has passed without my producing anything but a few Weblog entries.

I have plenty to work on, even though I haven't been dreaming any good stories lately.

I'm still searching for a good program for writing on the Mac. If I don't find something soon, I'm going to load the Mac version of Power Writer and use that (assuming I can find the DVD disk).

I've been dreaming again. I wrote up the first few dream segments for my creative writing class but have done nothing since the class ended. There were a variety of reasons:

• I want to shift my writing activities to my new Mac Mini. I can load the software I've been using on Windows onto the Mini ... as soon as I find the disk.
• I've been trying a variety of other, alternative writing programs on the Mini but haven't been satisfied with any of them so far.
• We had a power failure. The PC had been powered down but the Mini was running. I thought it had been damaged until I (finally) tried to power up with all of its accessories (portable memory units) disconnected.
• The segments I wrote up were done as individual documents. Combining them into a single document would be a tedious, time-consuming task.
• It has been hot and I don't function well in the heat. My whole body was hurting, due to the arthritis, particularly the severe arthritis in my spine, until after things cooled down for a while. I couldn't sleep and had become a zombie.

My new story is about an old man who is visited by aliens from another universe as he is dying; they give him what they call colonies, replicas of his mind in a submicroscopic realm that allow him to repair himself and to do other things through the use of Zero Point energy. It still lacks any hint of a title although I've worked out a conclusion and a rough plot.

I have read all seven of the Harry Potter books, well over 4,000 pages detailing six consecutive years in the life of a young British wizard. The task took its author ten years. It also took her from financial insecurity to immense wealth. Now among the wealthiest people in her country, J. K. Rowling will never have to write another word for publication, although I, for one, certainly hope she continues to write.

One of Walt Disney's 'rules' for making successful movies and cartoons was to never let twenty seconds pass without something happening, no matter how trivial, because the attention span of many people was about half a minute. Jo Rowling seems to have used a similar philosophy (which I've never seen expressed), making sure each chapter not only caught the attention but also advanced the story as a whole. Something is always happening in a Harry Potter book, doubtless one of the reasons for its success. Reaching the end of a chapter (or a volume, or the series), the reader has a strong desire to continue reading. This also contributes to the success of the story.

But these are hard things for an author to do. It requires planning. Just getting a short story to end without any loose ends when the author stops writing is hard enough. To do so repeatedly, nearly annually, in the giant volumes of this story, shows extraordinary skill and hard work. Just keeping all the details consistent in a single volume would be difficult. Rowling must have known how the series would end while she sat on that stalled train and devised the story.

The format of the individual stories, each taking a small group of wizards through a single year of wizarding school, didn't make the task of organization or creation any easier. The characters had to develop as individuals while the story line advanced and each component tale had to be resolved within the period of a single year. The character, Harry Potter, began, in the very first story, unaware of magic and ignorant of the possibility of education in magical arts. That first novel, a classical growing up tale, took the hero from ignorance to awareness and some developing talent. The next six novels, therefore, could not be that same kind of story. They had to be different although they could continue to show the hero's development. Each story had to solve not only a different problem but a different kind of problem. To make matters worse, each tale not only had to be resolved by the end of the volume but had to contribute to the final resolution at the end of the series.

Lord of the Rings took three volumes, considered large at the time, to tell the story of a band of heroes of several species opposing an evil force over the period of roughly a year. The story was epic in nature, the characters reaching heroic stature, the bad guys no less so than the heroes. In comparison, the stories of Harry Potter are mundane, despite their heroic and magical components: the tale of British school-children growing up while attending school. The back story for Lord of the Rings is enormous, with portions of the back story being sold as individual novels. There appears to be relatively little back story for Harry Potter that wasn't integrated into the main story line. The seven individual tales are so well woven together that there appears to be nothing left to say. No subsidiary works seem possible. The tale has ended, once and for all.

Any author would do well to read the entire Harry Potter series as an example of good writing. Any author attempting to duplicate what Jo Rowling has accomplished would be out of their minds: you must scale back your story line according to your limitations. It may not be impossible to duplicate this tremendous feat and I suspect that many people who try will actually have their stories published. Who knows? Perhaps somebody will come up with a tale as much larger and more complex than Harry Potter than it was larger and more complex then Lord of the Rings. If it happens, I hope I'll see it. I know I won't be the one to do it, though.