Hello, I'm Dr. Flora Strangelove . . .

Recently I had one of those dreams where I couldn't remember who I was, where I was, or how I had gotten there. To compound my confusion, I dreamed that I woke up in that state. I believe the term for that kind of experience is false awakening (but I may just be making that up from my own fevered imagination). It also didn't help that people sometimes actually do wake up without any idea where they are or how they got there – the experience is common enough to lend the dream that extra element of realism (and therefore that edge of panic).

In this dream, I woke up of the hood of a car. I had no memory of going to sleep there. But oddly, I did know something: it had happened before. So instead of flipping out, I tried to take stock of the situation.

This attempt to make sense of the unknown is what lies at the heart of many dreams. The circumstances usually don't make the slightest sense, so the explanations we come up with can be quite creative. In this case, I noticed that I was in a parking lot, possibly next to an Interstate, and there was a building nearby that could have been bathrooms. A few other cars were in the lot, and some of them also had people sleeping on the hoods. Those people had blankets and pillows; once I saw that, I realized that I did too. So probably I was sleeping on my hood on purpose, rather than ending up there as the result of an accident (or a drunken misadventure).

Once I reached this conclusion, I noticed there was another critical piece of information that I had forgotten: my name. It should have been the first thing that came to mind, but it absolutely did not. When I wracked my brains for it, the name Flora bounced around like a withered peanut in its shell. So I thought maybe my name was Flora. But the name Dr. Strangelove was also knocking around in there, so by that reasoning my name must be Dr. Flora Strangelove.

And why are we all sleeping on our hoods instead of in our cars, where it's safer? I wondered. The temperature was comfortable outside, maybe that was it. But wait – if we were near an interstate, we might be far enough away from town to see the stars. So I rolled onto my back to look up and, sure enough, the Milky Way stretched across the sky in full, fabulous display. I figured this must be why I had decided to sleep on the hood: so I could enjoy this view.

As I gazed in wonder, I heard a sound that knocked my panic level up a notch: someone stirred beside me. I had company on that hood.

Slowly I turned my head to gaze at this menace. But he was asleep too, and he was in a sleeping bag. That suggested that he hadn't just snuck up on me, he belonged there. I studied his face, but didn't recognize it. Maybe if I had been looking in a mirror I wouldn't have known myself, either. As I stared at him, he pried an eye open and focused on me.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm Doctor Flora Strangelove.”

He managed to look baffled, even though he was only half awake. “Huh?' he said. “Wha – ?”

And then I woke up for real.

These half-baked little scenarios are exactly the sort of thing that get writers thinking. The human brain can't help trying to find patterns, even if no real pattern exists. The philosophy of a writer is that it doesn't matter what's real – you can make it seem real. You just have to find an interesting way to fill in the blanks. And that's why dreams like the one in which I played Dr. Flora Strangelove are more interesting than frustrating. Even if I never do much with it, I'll wonder why those two people were sleeping on the hood of that car together. Were they married? Were they private investigators (with a really small budget)?

Who else was in that parking lot . . . ?

The illustrations for these posts are from the files of Ernest Hogan. The one of the long-fingered lady at the top is the cover for my ebook, Pale Lady. Download it for free on Smashwords!

Humility 101

They say that anyone who can be discouraged from becoming a writer, should be discouraged. And though I'm not usually the sort to try to discourage anyone, if you're considering becoming a writer, there's something you need to know right off the bat: writing is a humbling experience.

Let's get our definitions straight. By humbling, I'm not talking about the way you would feel if you received an award and you got behind a podium and said, “I am humbled by this honor.” Because, let's face it, you're the opposite.

And I'm not talking about the way you would feel if you were writing a book about a tragic event, and you did a bunch of interviews with people who survived it, and you said, “I am humbled by their strength and their courage.” Because you're actually impressed, not humbled. Maybe a little shamed, too, because you might wonder if you could rise to the challenge as well as they did.

Nope. I'm talking about the way you feel when someone pisses on you in public and the witnesses all laugh at you. Or the way you feel when you've worked really hard on something, and you're really proud of it, and someone walks by, takes a long look at it, makes a face, and says, “Meh.” (Also in public, because that's one of the main components of humiliation.) And just in case you think these humiliations will go away once you've become established, popular, and successful – forget it. You will be humbled again and again, for as long as you continue writing.

I know what you're thinking. “Sure, Devenport – crummy writers like you get humbled. I bet you get lots of bad reviews, and no one comes to your signings, editors give you the razz, and your own agent probably doesn't even return your phone calls. But I'm talented! I'm [fill in the names of several writers you admire] all rolled into one! Sure, I may get an occasional bad review from a jealous critic, but 99.99% of readers will know talent when they see it. These people are hungry for good books. In fact, they're starving. I know I'm better than most of the bozos on the best-seller list. If people like that mediocre stuff, wait 'till they get a load of the real deal!”

Okay, maybe you would word it a little differently (you are such a backseat driver), but you know you're thinkin' it. And that's the main reason you will be humbled. It's not because of bad reviews by jealous critics. Critics aren't jealous, they're arrogant (a human foible shared by writers). It's not even because sales will often fall short of expectations (make that drastically short) – that's just disappointing and discouraging. Depressing, too.

The main reason why being a writer is such a humbling experience is that your expectations rarely match up with reality, even when you should know better, even when you've been at this for decades and have had your share of ups & downs. Because writing books takes more self-confidence than most people will ever have, and that's only a half-good thing. It's that arrogance I mentioned earlier. You need it so you'll take risks and believe in your work. You need an obsessive-compulsive condition too, an attribute that will goad you into writing more books, long after your common sense has warned you that writing is a crummy way to make a living.

There are a thousand insults and disappointments you will suffer as a writer. This is regardless of your critical and/or financial success. Remember what you just said about those bestsellers you can write better than? (Okay, I said it, but you were thinking it.) Log onto any book site featuring Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Stephanie Meyer, or any other popular writer you can think of, and you will find negative reviews tarnishing all the good ones. Every writer who has ever lived has critics who will pick apart their work. Sure, financial success probably mitigates a lot of that disappointment, but only about the top 5% of writers enjoy real financial success. The rest of us have to take the insults and the injuries. We live, breathe, and dream a book for several months (or years), and then watch it turn into McBook – just one more hamburger out there on the market being perused by consumers who are always at least a little disdainful, and jaded, and ready to dismiss us just as soon as the next thing catches their eye.

All writers, obscure or popular, well paid or broke, share an essential disappointment, a realization that ultimately our work is just smoke and mirrors, an illusion we've tinkered together, a collection of ghosts who can't stand up to the daylight. It doesn't matter what anyone says or thinks about our work now, because eventually no one will say or think anything about it at all. It's like that poem by Shelley about Ozymandius, “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing is left of those works but a pedestal.

Shelley's poem will probably survive several more centuries, but even his work will probably fall to dust, eventually.

This fact does not sit well with the grandiose fragment of the writer's personality that drives us to write in the first place, so we feel humbled. Add that to all the other slights and disappointments we suffer as writers, and that humility really starts to pile up.

And that's not a bad thing. I would venture to say it's good for you. But you have to be tough to withstand it. So grow a thick skin.

You're going to need it.

Notes From A Dreamed Life

I had an Ah-Hah moment while I was sitting in a theater watching Inception, the movie about people who are trapped in endless loops and multiple levels in a dream. Up until that point, the story had been entertaining, engrossing, thought-provoking, and just plain fun. But then one of the characters mentioned that when you enter deeper levels in a dream, time is experienced differently. In the waking world, minutes may be passing. But in this dream sub-level, years seem to be going by.

This has happened to me. Perhaps ten times in my life, I've gone to bed and experienced lifetimes before I woke up. I can't nail the number down exactly, because the sensation of having lived all those years fades within minutes upon waking. I'm left with snippets of memories from that dreamed life, lived in a dazzling universe full of wonders, terrors – and love. And I grieve for the loss, until even that sensation fades. If I'm lucky, I can salvage some of the images, events, characters, landscapes, mystical and emotional qualities, and weave them into one of my novels. So as I sat in that darkened theater, watching those characters dive deeper and deeper into a dream, I thought “Ah-hah!” This was why I became a writer. I've been trying to preserve what I can of those lost, dreamed lives.

Christopher Nolan, writer and director of Inception, may not have had the same experience with time dilation in a dream that I have, but he at least knows that such a thing is possible. I have no idea how many other people do. When I talk with others about their dreams, some common experiences come up. Some dreams seem to be meaningless jumbles of random images and sounds. Others seem like mystical conduits to the afterlife, where you can speak with loved ones who have passed away. Some dreams drive you like demons of anxiety, regret, guilt, and terror, until you feel grateful to wake up again, even though you're exhausted. Anyone who has ever been to school has had the one about forgetting to go to class and suddenly being confronted with a final exam you're not prepared to take. Not to mention the one about being naked in public.

Both of my recent novels, The Night Shifters, and Spirits Of Glory, were inspired by dreams. Not all of those dreams were the sort that seemed to last years – many of them were fairly short. And my novels aren't composed of 100% dream material – if they had a laundry label, it might read, 30% research, 20% brainstorming, 35% dream, 15% dumb luck. Every writer has a different experience with inspiration. But I wonder – how many writers have lived for years inside a dream, as I have? Is it a common experience, or rare? Or does it differ for every dreamer, just as inspiration does?

Leonardo DiCaprio's character is haunted by the dream of his lost love in Inception. Whether or not the movie has a happy ending depends on whether or not you believe it does. It all depends on how you chose to look at it. And ultimately, that's how I've come to terms with the loss of my dream lives. I lived them – the other choice is not to have known them at all. And who knows? Some day, when this current dream life is over, I may wake to find myself in another.

In the meantime, I'll write down what I remember, and hope for the best.

Speaking Of OCD . . .

Most people who know anything about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are familiar with its more common forms: Scrupulosity, where people are anxious about germs and constantly wash their hands, and Checking: where people worry that they've left some appliance on, and the house will burn down if they don't keep going back to check it, over and over. Another common manifestation is Counting: having to count up to some astronomically high number before you can go through a door, or turn the light-switch on and off a certain number of times. There are actually quite a lot of dimensions to OCD, and as many varieties of symptoms as there are sufferers. And though OCD can seriously undermine the happiness and mental health of the people who experience it, an Obsessive Compulsive condition can actually be helpful to some people. The most obvious example I can present for this is the writer.

Many writers joke about it, but most of us agree that our vocation is kind of peculiar. It's an offshoot of Compulsive Thoughts, which drive some people to worry about things that haven't actually happened, but that maybe COULD happen. Technically, writers tell stories about people they don't know, doing things they never witnessed, set in places they've never been. If we do it well enough, we can convince the reader it's all true. It's a win-win situation – we get to channel this nutty drive that compels us to make stuff up, and the reader gets to be entertained. But sometimes, odd side effects develop.

I first noticed one of these side effects about 14 years ago, when I was writing Broken Time. I'm a four-finger typist, and I make a lot of mistakes when I'm typing. I usually look at the keyboard instead of the screen while I'm working – a bad habit. During the writing process I go back every few sentences or to see if I've goofed. And of course, I have. So I fix the boo-boos, eliminating some letters and adding others. Pretty straight-forward, right? It would be for a sane person. But while I was writing Broken Time, I kept accidentally duplicating letters. And I didn't use the mouse as much then as I do now, so I'd use keys to get back to the boo-boo and delete one of the letters. And sometimes I would be too lazy to go all the way to the last redundant letter, and swoop down on the first, instead.

Notice my use of the term, swoop down. The metaphor is telling. I have too much imagination for my own good. I started to think of those letters as creatures who cringed as they waited to see who would die in the claws of the delete button. And if I grabbed the first letter instead of the last, I'd think, That letter thought he was safe. And then – BOOM.

I knew this was irrational. I even joked about it at first. This is the insidious thing about OCD – you can be perfectly aware that it's irrational, yet still be helpless to shrug it off. The harder you try, the worse it gets. In my case, the notion of the cringing letters distracted me enough to make my four-finger-typing method even more laborious than it already is. It continually knocked me out of the peculiar mental state all creative folks enter so they can concentrate on crafting a story out of multiple threads.

Creativity is a double-edged sword. But creativity is also the answer to the problem. I couldn't fight the silly notion that the letters were cringing. So I decided to make up a story about them. And it was fairly simple. When the letters get deleted, they're not dying. They're simply being transferred into a waiting room until they get used again in another word. While they're in the waiting room, they can read magazines, watch re-runs of Dr. Phil, whatever. Every time I had to delete a letter, I pictured this.

It worked. I no longer picture swooping and cringing. I picture letters who read too many magazines and watch sleazy daytime TV. Happy letters. Happy Em.

Happy ending. If you can make people believe that, you've succeeded. Whether or not it's because of your OCD or despite it depends on your point of view.

See you in the waiting room. I'll save you a good magazine.

About The Night Shifters

“Hazel – promise me you won't give up on your dreams.”

“I won’t, Mom!” Hazel swears, assuming Mom means that she should try to be whatever she wants to be – a doctor, or lawyer, or even a mermaid. Hazel is just nine, but she really means to keep that promise.

Seventeen years later, she wonders if she’s broken it – or maybe just failed to fully realize it, because she hasn’t become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a mermaid. Or anything much, really. Yet, in one way, she has kept her promise – because Hazel is a Grand Champion Dreamer. When she’s asleep, she dreams a dazzling universe full of heroes and monsters, princesses and goddesses, cities and temples and gardens that make the most wonderful places on Earth seem dull in comparison.

During the day, she does what she has to do to pay the bills. At bedtime, she turns in, confident that she will dream, and that the sun will come up in the morning. So on the evening of her last day, she embraces the night wholeheartedly and drifts into the universe of her imagination.

But when the alarm goes off, she opens her eyes to darkness. The sun hasn’t come up, the world outside has become a City of Night, and the dwellers there are Night Shifters – gods and elves, daemons and djinns, dreamers and wizards. All of them have their own agendas, all of them are chasing Hazel – and as she fights to understand this world of dreams and her place in it, she can’t help remembering what her mother said.

And she wonders. All those years ago, when she swore to never give up on her dreams, did she really understand what she was promising?

The Night Shifters

Just a brief announcement here – I've published my new novel on Smashwords: The Night Shifters (by Emily Devenport). Smashwords will feature it on their site, but (best of all) they have converted the document to different formats and will distribute it to other online vendors like amazon and Sony. My next blog will describe the steps I had to take to reach this point, and profile the professional folks who helped me along the way with cover art, editing, and document conversion. I hope to have an audio version available soon – that bit of techno-wizardry is still making my head spin.

Please take a look at The Night Shifters – I opted for the sampling feature, so you can read up to 50% of the book and decide whether you like it enough to shell out the $.99 cover price. It's a humorous Urban Fantasy that puts a whole new spin on the advice that you should never give up on your dreams . . .

Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Giant, Marauding, Mutated Komodo Dragons

I am ridiculously dazzled by how much things have changed during my lifetime. My mother, who was born in 1921, whose father owned a Model T (that was one of the original cars, children), who lived through the Great Depression, the invention of the modern washing machine and air conditioners, WWII, McCarthyism, the assassination of an American president, the Space Race, and the computer revolution just takes it all in stride. But me? I have to sit back and go WOW because I don’t submit manuscripts through the mail anymore. I submit them electronically.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. It’s fast, cheap. way more reliable, and no one has to worry about anthrax powder in the envelope (speaking of how much things have changed). Honestly, this isn’t a rant against change, it’s just that I’m amazed at how excited I used to get about the mail.

If you were born after the computer revolution, try to get a picture of the situation: When I was a young writer, computers were just making the shift from the big (sometimes room-sized) computers that didn’t have microchips to the desk-top variety. Computer jockeys found the concept of writing actual prose (instead of code) so odd they called it “Word Processing.”

I processed my first words on one of my mom’s old typewriters, a massive metal gizmo so old, it probably belonged to my grandfather. Back in the day, the Smith-Corona company ruled the roost for several decades with their high-quality typewriters, based on designs from the Edwardian Age. You could think of them as Steampunk gizmos. The keyboard you’re writing with now is based on the arrangement of those typewriter keys. I really had to strike those old keys hard, because they were attached to levers that reared up and struck an inked ribbon, which transferred the ink to the page in the shape of the letter. They made a lot of noise, too (that was my favorite thing about them). My metal monster was a Smith, it actually pre-dated the formation of the Smith-Corona company. If I still had it (I have no idea where it ended up), it would be about 100 years old now.

The worst thing about the Smith is that it was so heavy, I had trouble moving it by myself. So my mom gave me her old manual portable. It was a spiffy little thing (still pretty big compared to the Apple MacBook I’m working on now). It had that space-age Sixties look to it. I loved it, but it also was not without its issues. Once I had written a couple of novels on it, one of the ribbon-winding springs broke, so after I had typed about a page-and-a-half, I had to manually re-wind the ribbon. I wrote two more novels under those circumstances. So that was stage 2 of the labor process (stage 1 being the actual writing).

Stage 3 was the cut-and-paste process. That wonderful function that you can do automatically with a computer (GOD I love that), used to actually involve scissors and glue, because very few writers could actually type worth a damn. I type using four fingers, and I can go pretty fast, but my accuracy sucks. Plus I still make goofy spelling errors. That was half the problem. The other half is that you always change your mind about a manuscript, how you want to word things, what order things should go in, stuff that needs to be added, stuff that needs to be cut, etc., etc. So you would get out those scissors and that glue, cut the thing up, and glue it back together again. Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Okay, I’m actually losing track of how many steps I’ve named here, but the next one was to take your manuscript down to a copy place and make photocopies of the mess. They would offer to run it through one of their new, fast gizmos with automatic feed, and I would warn them that my glue-y, fat pages would probably get stuck. Somehow, I managed to make copies worthy of mailing to editors. I still have some of those old photocopies, and I cringe when I see how messy they look. But at the time I was as proud of them as a mother is of her child, so I got two manilla envelopes (bought in bulk, I still have a bunch), addressed one to the publishers, addressed one to myself, went down to the post office and bought postage for both envelopes, stuffed the manuscript, the self-addressed envelope, and a cover letter into the other envelope, and mailed them off.

It felt really good to do that. Back when I was a short-story writer, I often had three or four stories out at any given time. And that brings us back to my original point: the mail. I used to love it so. After going through all those previous steps, once I mailed those suckers off, I really felt like I had accomplished something. I knew it would take editors 1 to 6 months to get back to me, and in the meantime I worked on new stuff to send out.

I often felt frustrated that it took editors so long to send me a YES or NO, but I knew my manuscript was sitting in a very big pile. I figured the competition was stiff. Editors said that 99% of the stories they received were crap, but that still left a lot of stories in the 1% pile. I believed it was possible mine would get picked. So every day, I waited for the mail with bated breath, wondering if an acceptance letter was sitting in there. I ended up selling about a story a year, and if I had never sold a novel, that probably would have been enough to keep me going for quite a while (not money-wise, of course).

To add to my fascination with the mail, my husband and I were courting, long-distance. We met in 1984, but he was living in California and I was living in Arizona. We wrote 3 to 4 letters to each other a week -- we often wrote to each other as a warm-up exercise for the writing we were going to do for the day. We didn’t just gush about romantic stuff, we often wrote about what we were working on, what we were hoping to accomplish. We were pretty hopelessly in love by then (as of this writing, we’ve been married over 20 years), so finding a letter from Ernie in my mailbox often gave me the strength to get though the next few days, to battle giants and dragons.

Getting an acceptance letter was enough to send me into the stratosphere. Heck, even getting a positive rejection letter could do that. I made files for my stories and kept every rejection letter -- looking at the file helped me remember who had already seen the story. (Eventually, those folders got to be kind of depressing, but that’s another blog.) So, perhaps not surprisingly, I eventually started dreaming about the mail.

In these dreams, my mailbox would be stuffed with acceptance letters, letters from Ernie, mysterious checks that showed up for no reason, that sort of thing. But the dream that summed it up was the dream where Godzilla showed up.

If you’ve ever seen the original Godzilla movie (Japanese version, 1954, American dubbed version with Raymond Burr added, a few years later), you may recall a scene where Godzilla was stomping his way through downtown Tokyo. A businessman spots him from his 20th floor window, and starts to run for the emergency exit, but suddenly remembers he has a suitcase full of cash hidden away (don’t all businessmen?), so instead of saving himself, he runs to get the suitcase. He’s halfway out of his office when Godzilla pulverizes the building, and it all crashes down on top of him and his money. The moral of this story? Money is less important than your life.

I dreamed Godzilla had reached my neighborhood and was stomping his way down my street. I ran out the front door and was about to beat a fast retreat when I noticed the mailbox was stuffed full of mail. Oh joy! Maybe there are SASEs in there!

STOMP, STOMP, STOMP . . .

There’s so much mail I keep dropping stuff. I’ve got to pick it all up, it looks like everyone got back to me at once! Oh wow, is that an SASE from Asimov’s?

STOMP, STOMP STOMP . . .

Amazing, I’m hearing from editors I haven’t even sent manuscripts to yet! They heard about me through the grapevine and they want me to send stories! They’re so sure they’ll like them they’re paying me in advance!

STOMP, STOMP, STOMP!

I’m tearing open another SASE when a shadow falls over me. I look up in time to see a giant, reptilian foot descending.

STOMP.

Come to think of it, that last part sums up my career pretty well.

Anyway, I don’t care that much about the mail anymore. I can go for days without checking it. All of the fun has gone out of it, unless I’m waiting for something I bought online. For a while, I used to get excited about e-mail, but since I’m going to be publishing a bunch of new books myself, I don’t expect to hear from editors that way anymore. It’s just not the same.

On the up side, if Godzilla ever does show up on my street, I won’t get stomped because I just had to check the mail on my way out. No, I’ll probably get stomped because I’m old and can’t run worth a damn.

Progress! Ya gotta love it.

UPDATE, 2019: shazam!  Things have definitely improved since I wrote this.  I've sold new stories to Clarkesworld, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Unfit, Uncanny, and several others.  The self-publishing gig was mostly a bust, but I sold two novels to Tor, Medusa Uploaded and Medusa in the Graveyard.  I've even learned to look forward to the snail mail again, though now I have a PO box.  For the time being, I'm okay with progress.  

Maybe I'll do another update in 10 years . . .