These days it's often a surprise when I open my eyes and discover I'm not really in the dream I was having after all. It's momentarily disconcerting and I usually wish to remain asleep to continue in that realm of fiction. I've heard the term 'lucid dreaming' used to describe the variety of slumber stories wherein the dreamer is an active participant, directing the dream as though directing a cinematic drama. I am an actor in that drama, as well. I am also its audience and its most ardent critic. I also sell tickets.
Being in the dream is what being the reader of a novel is all about. If it's a good book, I forget where I am, where I came from, my home world, as it were, while in the pages of text. Perhaps that's my special ability: to conjure in my mind all sorts of strange things, organize them into a coherent and compelling narrative such that others who attempt to enter the world I create will be likewise mesmerized into forgetting their true existence outside the pages.
I've always known I would grow older, but I never quite imagined growing old. There were advantages to growing older but none, so far as I can see, in growing old. The stories are not better. I'm compelled to go back to my youth and dig around there to find something to work on now. That leads me to the starting point of my latest novel, a science fiction epic (in scope, not length) titled THE MASTERS' RIDDLE. Mind the apostrophe placement for I intend the reference to be plural and possessive. The riddle belongs to all of them. It is a collective riddle.
One day in my teenage years I returned home bitter and broken and threw myself down upon my bed. I have no recollection what might have thrashed me; in those days it likely could have been my crush of the week who did not know I existed and who may have turned away to go on to class without ever seeing me pining away for her and taking her innocent rejection of me, having never noticed my presence among a throng of students in the corridor, as a measure of my worth in society.
Regardless of the exact nature of the instigating factor, I lay on my bed, my back to the bedspread - my mother always insisted on making the bed each morning - and I placed my hands up beside my head in some kind of horizontal surrender gesture. As I lay there, I began to wonder what it would be like - a common wonder of the time - to be a prisoner, moreover, a prisoner who was fixed to his bunk by having his hand bolted to the surface of that bunk or bed or floor or whatever thing he lay upon. So I lay there imagining the sensations I would experience. Perhaps that was a kind of Asperger's syndrome thing - which I didn't have any knowledge of back then. The result was a new story - part of one, anyway. I got to my manual typewriter and tapped out a rudimentary version of what you now have as Chapter 1. That was it; that was all. And it sat for many years.
Because I had, by then, completed my sci-fi steampunkish epic THE DREAM LAND Trilogy which involved another world accessed via an interdimensional doorway, I saw my prisoner protagonist as another human-like person but from the planet that serves as the setting for much of the Dream Land trilogy. However, as I wrote further during that November, my alien became little by little less human. I got way off track by the end of the month. I got way past his escape (that's not a spoiler because if he doesn't escape we don't have a story) and . . . umm, other spoiler bits . . . when the month ended. I had composed 55,555 words and "won" the competition. But the story and the novel were not yet finished.
I stopped at a bad place, a natural pause in the plot which did not have any planning for what would come next. A deadly situation. So it was natural for me to set it aside and work on other projects. I dabbled on THE MASTERS' RIDDLE a bit once in a while. I tried to think of a better title, which dated from that angst-ridden horizontal imagining of my youth but could not come up with one - so I embraced the title and decided to play further on the riddle motif right to the end. One thing I did in the interim was to insert a whole chapter in the middle of what I'd already written for NaNoWriMo which takes us back to our hero's home and the "people" there who wonder what has happened to our hero. Then back to the prison planet we go to continue the story.
All right, great, got this far, now how to proceed? It was turning into something very interesting to me, especially after I let my protagonist completely shed his/her human persona and be his/her alien self - totally and unabashedly non-human. All of his/her cohort were non-human, too. That allowed me to delve into different biology, mythology, and languages. Those alien features enabled many plot twists that would have been unavailable to a human protagonist. But where to go next? As someone who may have been a great writer whose name has been long forgotten (by me, at least) once allegedly said: If in doubt start again . . . maybe from way over there.
So I did. I introduced a new character out of the blue. The idea was to show my alien protagonist's view of where he was then show his enemy's view of the same world. Now wouldn't that be interesting? Then they meet. What could go wrong, right? Thus began part two from a completely different point of view . . . for a while. Then they meet under difficult circumstances. Now we see our hero from someone else's perspective. Neat, huh? Most of the remainder of the novel is the two of them working at cross-purposes and in reversed roles - e.g., the prisoner becomes the warden while the guard becomes the prisoner. In this way I can show more angles of the story prism.
But there is still that pesky riddle to solve. Fortunately in fiction all answers are available. Perhaps the answer is the riddle itself. All one needs is a spirit guide to lead the way to discovery of the meaning of everything. And the discovery of that answer will save our hero's society from extinction - a not unworthy goal even bigger than simply returning home to family and a job with stories to tell.
Perhaps I've raved enough at the light of day, calling the dogs of night once more, and should halt before the gates of spoilers open wide. For that is all ye know and all ye can know for the remainder of time . . . or until the last page is turned. I keep stating unequivocally that THE MASTERS' RIDDLE is my last novel - but I said the same after EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS for I believed then that I had said everything I wanted to say about everything and had nothing more to add. I have no other projects well enough along that I could expect to finish them soon, but I will continue to write . . . something. Who knows if it will be something that is eventually completed and foisted upon an undeserving world. Only the goddesses know for sure.
NEXT: The amazing world of the Aull of Sebbol.
(C) Copyright 2010-2021 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
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