1000 words from
Dream
The house sat at the end of the street, a roughly cubical, two-story hollow trunk topped by the spreading branches of the tree that formed it. On either side, two ornamental trees stood. A smaller dwelling tree grew just behind and to one side, its branches carefully pruned to limit it to the size of a garden shed. The bark of the main house was dark and smooth, indicating great age, perhaps a hundred years or more. Ten generations might have lived and died in this dwelling tree. As soon as tomorrow, another new family could be moving into it.
Anda stood at the edge of the bitumen street regarding the house in silence. It was her third assignment. The first had been the former home of a woman with no children. She had managed to accumulate an amazing amount of stuff in the one-hundred-twelve months of her life. The second had been challenging, a man of only a hundred months who took his own life after his wife died.
This one would be easier. This man had lived an astonishing one hundred twenty months—ten whole years. His wife had passed away only six months earlier, and his two children had gone back to their homes in a different city, so they wouldn’t try to interfere with Anda’s work.
Morning sun filtered through the leaves, kissing Anda’s upturned face. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft rustling of leaves high above as they silently turned the light into power and food.
“It’s an old one, eh?” someone said just behind her.
Anda startled and turned quickly around.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” It was the other recycler assigned to clean up the house, a man she didn’t recognize.
Anda exhaled. “It’s alright. I’m Anda Omnater.”
“Rain,” he said, “Kirtson.”
Anda smiled and bowed her head in greeting. Rain did the same. His last name indicated that he was single, and the son of someone named Kirt…
“Oh,” she said. “Are you Kirt’s son?”
“That is what I said.”
“No, I mean Kirt, the owner. The boss.”
He gave a crooked smile and shrugged slightly. “Yeah. Doomed to a life of cleaning up dead people’s junk, ah, possessions I mean.”
Behind him on the street sat one of the recycling trucks, and Anda wondered that she hadn’t heard it approach. The street must be remarkably clean and the truck in good shape to drive so silently.
“Well, let’s get to work, then,” Anda said, facing the house and shifting her backpack higher on her shoulders.
“Yes,” Rain said, a little bit of a sigh preceding the word. He turned back to the truck. Anda watched him walk away. He wore ocean blue short pants, leaving his legs bare from mid-thigh down to his toe-protective work sandals. His shirt was off-white and short-sleeved, loose with no collar. It was typical summer workwear, and Rain had the lean, muscular legs and arms of a laborer—though his thighs looked particularly strong. Anda wondered if she’d eventually look more like that. Right then, she felt like a skinny, weak newborn. Rain would probably insist on doing all the heavy lifting.
As Rain unloaded the cart and bin from the side of the truck, Anda turned and started toward the house. The front door unlocked for her touch and swung inward. The lights brightened, revealing her day’s work.
The air felt a little stale and carried the slightest musty smell along with an unexpected odor of fresh paint. It didn’t take long to spot the source of that smell—an easel holding a small, unfinished painting on a flat board. On a table beside the easel sat a palette and brushes, all clean.
“That’s a good sign,” Anda remarked to herself.
“What’s a good sign?” Rain asked from the doorway.
Anda turned. “You keep sneaking up on me.”
He only smiled as he wheeled the cart through the door, its tools and supplies clattering as it crossed the threshold.
“He cleaned up his palette and brushes,” she said, turning back to face the front room. “Even though the painting isn’t finished.”
“That’s Stin for you.” Rain stepped up beside her. “This should be an easy job.”
Anda reached her right hand over and absently scratched her upper left arm. “You knew him?”
Rain hesitated a moment. “Yeah.” Then he turned back to the cart, busying himself putting on gloves.
The unfinished painting drew Anda in, and she crossed the room to get a better look at it. It was about thirty centimeters square, made on a pale board with little grain—probably some kind of evergreen. The board had been painted white with careful strokes, and onto that base layer a scene was taking shape in broad strokes. But the proportions were off, the strokes clumsy, and Anda had to look for quite some time before she figured out what it was meant to be.
“I think it’s a bicycle race,” she announced.
“Probably,” Rain replied. He held up another picture, a framed photograph of a man standing behind a bicycle. The man had dark hair, almost black, and weathered brown skin.
“Oh,” Anda said, looking at the wall near Rain. It was covered with photographs, and most of them contained a bicycle. “Was he a racer?”
“Yeah,” Rain said as he dropped the picture into the bin.
“I just learned to ride.” Anda scanned the photographs, mesmerized.
“Good for you!” Rain said. “Seems like most people don’t bother with it.”
One photo caught Anda’s eye. She reached up and detached it from the wall. It showed the man, Stin, standing with his arm around a much younger man—who looked like Rain. They both wore racing clothes. “Is this…” she started to ask as she turned. But Rain was right next to her again, and she jumped, dropping the frame.
Rain caught it in one hand as it fell. He gave Anda a bemused half-smile, and she felt her face grow hot.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, looking solemnly down at the photo and caressing the frame with one hand. “Stin got me started in bike racing.”
“Oh, you race too?” That explained the thighs.
He nodded. “You ever thought about it?”
Anda bit her lip before answering. “I’ve always been a runner, like my mother. But I really like bicycles. I had to teach myself to ride. So…maybe?”
“You should try it,” Rain said, looking back down at the photograph. “I’m keeping this one.”
This is the beginning of a sequel to The Freezer, and it’s almost completely different. The Freezer takes place on Earth in the near future. This book, with the working title Dream (as in “life is but a…”), takes place on an alien world with alien inhabitants who only live for about ten years. This short lifespan influences every other aspect of the world that I’m building, from their family relationships to their laws and customs.
What does this alien world have to do with The Freezer? At this point, I’m a little afraid to provide a clear answer. I don’t want to spoil anything.
What I will say is that it does indeed have much in common, and if you’ve read The Freezer, you might be able to guess what.
One thing is that the premise was inspired by a dream my wife had. She dreamed about a world where the inhabitants had great powers. Their power of teleportation was particularly problematic, because if they thought about a place, they would suddenly appear there. To prevent this from happening accidentally, their memories would be blocked.
So, you have a world where everyone has immense power. They clearly need to be trained in how to properly use this power. But the power itself makes training difficult. One solution might be to send young people to a special school and block their memories of life prior to entering the school. Then they not only can’t remember how to use their powers, but they don’t even know they have them. Now they can be trained gradually, one concept at a time, one power at a time.
And with such great power as these people have, it wouldn’t be an ordinary school the way we imagine it, but on a much grander scale—say, an entire planet.
Sound familiar? Now I confess my ultimate hope for this novel. I want to create an interesting, compelling, and almost unrecognizable instantiation of the Plan of Salvation. I want to show characters progressing through life as we do. I want to investigate some of the “why?” questions of Mormon theology. The first one is, “Why don’t we remember what came before?” And yes, I realize that I’ve only provided a partial, possible answer. But we are, after all, beings of immense power and abilities. If our memories of the pre-existence were intact, it would interfere with what we’re here to do.
So I’m building a world that reflects the reality of our own world to give the reader a perspective that they can then, if they like, apply to the real world.
It’s overly ambitious, I know. But even if I fail miserably, I’ll still have an interesting story told with heart and passion. And if I do it right, no one will even know what my intention was. Except you, because I just confessed.
My next confession is that, for a writer, I don’t write much. Chalk it up to having four high-maintenance children, or maybe I’m just not good at managing my time, or I have ADD. It’s probably all three.
So if I’m honest about my process, it’s something like this:
Have an idea.
Write some notes about it.
Discuss it with my wife and kids over dinner.
Write more notes.
Watch TV.
I haven’t managed to write consistently on a daily basis since I wrote The Freezer in 2012. (I’m a little like Patrick Rothfuss without fans.) This passage from Dream was written in 2019—and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. I have written most of another novel, Split, which I intend to finish next month. But aside from a whole bunch of notes on world-building, Dream has languished for years.
Other things I might say about my “process”:
I write what I know. Bits of my personal life and fragments of my interests and knowledge sneak into my writing, and I feel like that makes it better. For one, I really care about the stories I tell. For another, I’m kind of eccentric, so I know lots of things that most people don’t. I try really hard not to go all Mary Sue and write wish-fulfillment fantasy. (When I write a protag with a beautiful blonde wife of extraordinary capability, it’s not wish-fulfillment because I already have that wife.) Notice that this alien planet has bicycles? That’s because I love bicycles. Besides, they’re the natural evolution of the wheel. (Wagons to scooters to bicycles. After that, it’s all devolution.)
I’m somewhere between a pantser (write by the seat of your pants) and a plotter (outline the entire plot first). I try to outline as much of a novel as I can before beginning, but I can never get all the way through. I have to start writing—exploring the characters and how they interact with each other and the setting—before it becomes clear to me what the best ending will be. And sometimes I have to rewrite huge sections of a novel, or even the entire novel.
My workspace is a desk in an office that used to be a nursery. I have very intentionally decorated this office with things of significance to me because I spend eight hours a day in there. (My day job is as a technical writer, and I work from home. Add that to my list of why I don’t write much else.) But I often take my laptop elsewhere in the house or even outside to write. I can, amazingly, sit on the couch and write while my kids are fighting with each other in the same room. Hyper-fixation is great when you can get it to work for you.
I was an early adopter of the Scrivener software. I originally used it on an iBook G3, and I’m still using it on my 2012 MacBook Air. Now that I think about it, my Air is much older than the iBook was when I gave it up. Computers last so much longer than they used to. 🕮