Notes from Maine - 2020/12/12

There are few things as boring and meaningless (in my opinion) as listening to someone else’s dream. Still, I want to tell you about one I had several years ago.

My friends were getting married in a tall church in the middle of nowhere. She was getting ready in a long classroom on the ground floor. He was preparing up on the third floor, in the room with the ladder that led up to the bell tower.

He was late.

Someone (the best man, perhaps?) came down and asked if I would go talk to the groom and calm his nerves.

I found the groom with his bowtie loose around his neck and a rifle across his knees.

He pointed to the window.

“They’re coming,” he said.

The man was trembling and sweaty, but I didn’t think it was because of cold feet. I immediately knew that he was right. Hastening to the window, I looked down on the field and the edge of the woods.

“What are they?” I asked. I didn’t see anything down there.

“Aliens,” the groom said.

That word stopped me. I lost confidence in the sanity of my friend. The pressure of the wedding had broken his brain and he had a rifle in his hands.

He was going to kill someone.

That dream stayed with me for a while. I wrote it down and then rewrote and retold the story to myself. I tried to imagine how the rest of the day would turn out. Even though I was sure that he was delusional, I had the idea that the groom might start shooting while we tried to stop him. Then, perhaps we would discover that he had been right all along.

It’s impossible to really know how other people see the world.

What we consider “normal” behavior is just an average of all of our twisted realities.

With that in mind, I started from the beginning and rewrote everything. The result of that effort was a book called Kill Cycle. I’m sending it out for free today—I hope you enjoy it and share it with a friend. I constructed a different reality for each character in this book and I tried to stay true to their altered perceptions. Nobody in this book is seeing things precisely the way that they are. In that way, I tried to make it “realistic” even though strange things happen.

Hope you’re having a great December.