What Dreams May Come

I often have prophetic dreams. Yes, I know what you’re saying, there on the other side of the screen: “ooookay, another crazy writer.” And yet, it’s true. I often dream things that are going to happen, in some way – though the details can be horribly fuzzy or even wrong, the main thrust of the dream will be right.

I’m not going to claim it’s any kind of supernatural – I’d much rather it weren’t, in fact. I prefer to think it is the result of clues too subtle for my conscious mind to process, but clear to my subconscious. The only thing that doesn’t fit in this is when I dream of someone I haven’t heard from in years, and I wake up and the phone rings, and it’s that person. That gives me the idea that the universe is somehow a mechanism where these things are connected in a way we don’t perceive yet and perhaps can’t consciously. I like that too. It makes it a cool science fictional universe. “My friend thought of me, and the butterfly flapped its wings, and…”

Most of my prophetic dreams are about such exciting things as “an old friend will call you.” Or perhaps even MORE exciting things such as “tomorrow, you will see a mushroom on the side of this tree” or even MORE exciting such as “at a future date, you’ll cook steak and your younger kid will REALLY like it.” I mean, they don’t even rise to the “you’ll meet a tall, handsome stranger” level. They tend to be very short for one. You know, if I dreamed of a worldwide war, I’d probably dream the two minutes between waking up and turning on the TV with the sounds in the background either thunder or artillery.

Sometimes they give away a little more. Two of them stand out in memory because they relate to writing. In one I was reading a magazine with my story on it. This took place at an awards banquet. That last was spurious wishful thinking. The story, already written, did in fact sell a week later. (Plaudit Cives) It was my first short story sold.  (Well, first to be published.  By that time I’d sold Thirst four times, but it only saw light of day on the FIFTH.)

Then there are any number of them where I’m signing stories I haven’t written, and then I wake and don’t know what the stories were, so I forget the title.

However, one of them will be of interest to any fan of the Shifters’ series.

I’ve told this at a number of conventions, so you might have heard it. In 03 my first series had finally died and I’d broken up with my third agent. I hadn’t managed to sell any science fiction novels, which some of you know is where my heart and soul is. (No, I’m not saying I don’t like writing mystery and fantasy. If I didn’t I wouldn’t write them. I’m saying I fell in love with SF first and that like any first love this makes it special. Also, IMHO this makes my writing style even in mystery and fantasy “a little science fictional”.) Everywhere I turned, I got told “Fantasy outsells science fiction twenty to one” and I felt I’d never sell sf. Even in short stories my sales record for sf was half what it was for anything else. So… I felt adrift and a little lost. I got the contract to write Plain Jane under a house name, and while that’s easy for me, it wasn’t something I wanted to do a lot of. One book every few years was plenty. I wondered if I’d ever publish anything in fantastic literature again. Heck, I wondered if I’d ever publish under my own name.

And then I dreamed I was at a signing at the Mission Palms in Tempe, Arizona. This might be an incidental detail, since we’d just been there for a World Fantasy. I also dreamed my kids were in college, and grown (which seven years ago they definitely weren’t) and we were congratulating ourselves in getting everyone into the con, because at least one of them had flown from somewhere else I got a feeling in the East. (One is now in pre-med and living at home to cut costs, the other in a highschool-college dual program, also living at home.) At the time the younger was in elementary school.

Anyway, in this dream, I was sitting at the table and this woman came up with a HUGE box of my books. Now at the time I’d published exactly three books, so… OTOH this was a scene I’d often seen, sitting next to Dave Drake or other bestseller friends, so I figured it was filler. Still OTOH (I can haz as many hands as I wantz, thank you!) the dream had THAT feeling which can better be described as: In prophetic dreams I’m my dream self, but also my dreaming self. There’s the one who does and the one who watches.

As the fan started pulling books out of the box and putting them on the table, my dream self said, “Wow, you have everything, even the Shakespeare series.”

And she said “Yeah, I discovered you with your shifter series, and I went and bought everything you ever wrote.”

Now, at this point my dreaming self perked up her ears. I’d never written anything with – I presumed – shape shifters. As the fan enthused about the genius of setting an urban fantasy around a diner, and handed me the book I got a horrible shock. And I mean horrible. If you’ve seen the hard cover of Draw One In The Dark, you’ll understand. (And if you know that when he selected that cover Jim Baen was probably already suffering from the issues that killed him a few weeks later, you’ll understand even better.) And my dream-self said “Oh, good LORD you found one of the horrible cover hardcovers!”

The fan said something like, “Oh, yeah. It was hard, because once the series went bestseller those got even more expensive, but I’d heard you talk about it, and I wanted it.”

At which point my dreaming self went “best seller?” and under the guise of fidgeting while talking to fan, looked the book over thoroughly, noted Baen on the spine, and read first two pages and the back.

Now, I’ll not the series hasn’t gone bestseller – YET – perhaps it never will and that was a spurious detail. OTOH for reasons I have no space or time to explain, it was odd selling it to Baen at all. (For one my agent had other ideas at the time, but her hand got forced by circumstances.) The HORRIBLE cover was a second, bizarre coincidence. As was the fact that the publisher didn’t kill the series after the dismal showing that cover induced. So, maybe it will hit bestseller yet, who knows? It would seem to require a reprint of the first book, but that might change as digital books take over.

Meanwhile the answer for why I wrote the George and Kyrie and Tom and will continue to write them as long as the publisher buys them is “Because they’re dreams, and they need a chance.”