Sorry Vocal

“Creatures of my dreams raise up and dance with me, Now and forever I’m your king.” I’m fairly confident that anyone reading this will have heard the music that accompanies these lyrics though maybe not the lyrics themselves. The song “Outro” by Anthony Gonzalez in his alter-ego as M83 was used in too many movie-trailers, TV shows and commercials during the first half of the last decade. It’s a soulful, dramatic, even symphonic piece that catches the attention and immediately invokes powerful emotional responses. Heck, it got enough of my distracted attention to get me to consider buying a Mazda and eventually I even did get one (most fun-to-drive car I’ve ever owned).

The above lyrics create a deeper connection with us writers though. The album “Outro” ends is called Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and, yes, it deals almost exclusively with our dreams. The words have come to mean much more to me though after I completed my first and probably only novel a couple of years ago. Since finishing the book I’ve essentially failed to get anyone to read it aside from my long suffering wife, her best friend (a dear friend of mine as well) and one of my brothers-in-law. I have no connections in the industry and I’m (like most of you) a lousy schmoozer so I have gotten nowhere with the Great Wall of Ice that is the publishing industry. My failure goes deeper though.

"Creatures of my dreams raise up and dance with me". Here on Vocal and elsewhere we build tiny worlds peopled by these creatures of our dreams and those characters come to mean a great deal to us. It would surprise me greatly to hear from any of you that you don’t particularly care about your characters. What wouldn’t surprise me is to hear from Vocal writers that they find they’re emotionally attached to the lives of their creations. And therein lies the rub (with all due respect to the Bard).

The format that dominates here at Vocal for all intents and purposes (or is that intensive purposes?) tends toward shorter pieces which will entice readers to drop in for a quick, intense experience that starts and ends within minutes. No shock, I know. The characters in these short works generally don’t linger all that long in the creator’s mind and we then move on to new horizons and opportunities to get more “hits”, likes or at least looks. Writing in a vacuum is a cold, lonely affair that lets too much of the melancholy most of us face seep into our lives, whether we’re writing or not. Readers are the writer’s greatest blessing.

There’s nothing wrong (and much that’s right) about the short story/poetry form but I’ve stumbled on a phenomenon I’d like to tell you about which has cropped up as a corollary of working on that novel I mentioned. I spent three years with those particular ‘creatures of my dreams’ making them, explaining them, engaging them and ultimately depositing them in a situation I wouldn’t wish on the worst human being to have ever lived; …and I love them. When I started, I didn’t intend for them to be left with the unbearable responsibility which eventually fell on them, but I should have realized what was coming from the scenario with which I started.

More importantly, I miss them. They weren’t superheroes (enough with the vapid superheroes already!) they were regular young folk trying to just get into their lives from a disadvantaged starting point as members of the endlessly left out Generation Jones. They had foibles and loves, strengths and idiosyncrasies that made them very human, at least to me and the other three people who have read the book. And that was that. Unless I intend to read and reread the book over and over again like a demented hamster on her wheel, they’re dead. In creating Jerri and Trinnie, Rowan, Matt, Jake and the others- I killed them. They didn’t die in the novel- far from it- but without readers to care for them and invest in their struggles they’re as gone as the child you once were. Gone.

You can’t go back. One of the stipulations of the novel is that physical time-travel, as well as interstellar space travel is not a possibility, it can’t be done. The other major stipulation is that we are utterly alone in the Universe, there are no Mr. Spocks or Obi Wans to comfort us in our loneliness. Other sentient beings did exist in the deep past but they’re all long, long gone- we missed the party. I wanted to evoke this loss of ourselves in the wash of time and to see what this would do to the characters. It had the effect of raising the stakes drastically. This little blue marble floating in black infinity is all we have, and my Joe-Schmoe characters had its fate dumped on them unexpectedly by a set of circumstances they couldn’t ever have imagined let alone created.

I guess all I’m really saying is, be careful with the creatures of your dreams; we’re playing with more fire than we realize! Thanks for reading and good luck!