The Writing Life

From a newsgroup post dated October 14, 2014:

Had odd dreams last night; one was clearly the result of being on six (!) panels at Capclave, but the other isn’t quite so readily explained.

In the last dream, which was still going when I woke up, a reader was asking me (in e-mail, I think) when I was going to get back to my “Cyber War” setting, and whether it connected to my other story settings.

I explained that yes, it was connected to my two time-travel series, “The Deleted Dinosaurs” and “The Time Meddlers.”

None of these three actually exist, of course, and other people have written series called “Cyber War” and “Time Meddlers,” but “The Deleted Dinosaurs” sounds promising. Anyway, in the dream I’d written multiple stories in all three series, starting in the 1980s.

In that earlier dream I was one of the headliners at a second annual event where the first one had gone spectacularly well, to the point the organizers (I might have been one of them, it wasn’t clear) had done very little preparation, on the assumption that everything would go smoothly because it had before. It didn’t; no one could remember the schedule or find the printed programs (though we all agreed that they existed, albeit in insufficient numbers).

The event was some sort of writer-training thing. There were supposed to be panels and workshops, but the lack of organization meant those weren’t happening. At some point I took the bull by the horns and began lecturing a large audience on manuscript preparation — a lecture I have actually given, but not for a decade or more because it’s out of date in these days of e-mail and electronic submissions. I remembered its obsolescence when I woke up, but I don’t think I did during the dream. (The dream was interrupted by a neighbor’s yapping dog, but I went back to sleep and eventually dreamed about that three-part SF series.)

The lecture dream clearly resulted from Capclave, but the program at Capclave was actually superbly well run this year except for being too long — it started at 3:30 Friday (I was on that panel) and ran until 5:00 Sunday (I was on one of the last set, too; there were three at that hour, instead of just one). It was well-attended, too, except for that last slot.

The connected-stories thing, though, just comes from being a writer for a long time.

I don’t usually remember any of my dreams, let alone two semi-coherent ones from a single night; I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m pretty sure there was yet another dream I almost remembered in between the lecture and “Deleted Dinosaurs,” but I can’t recall any details.

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