Communion Of Dreams

There’s a new review up on Amazon.

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I woke from a *very* strange dream about 2:00 this morning. It was a partially lucid dream, where the awake part of my brain kept trying to re-arrange the dream components to solve a problem.

The problem? How to coordinate and communicate with a very large workforce in the basement of a huge construction site. For whatever reason, the foundation of the building had been put into place, but there were huge piles of random junk all throughout the various compartments of the basement. Each time I tried to come up with a way to make sure that everyone did what they needed to do, and was accounted for (in terms of safety and actually working), the size of the basement grew, as did the piles of junk to be dealt with.

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I’ve posted a fair number of items to the blog this week, but all of it has been quick links to videos I found of interest, or the sort of simple status updates I like to share about how the book is doing. There are all kinds of reasons why I post this stuff. It’s good to have these benchmarks noted on the blog for archive purposes, and people enjoy the oddball vids I come across. But these sorts of posts don’t require a lot of mental effort on my part, and when I post a string of them it usually indicates that something else is going on.

Sometimes I’m aware of what that “something else” is, sometimes it is only obvious in hindsight.

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I’ve been fighting a sore throat for more than a week. Nothing too bad, started out as just an ache. I figured at first it was probably just due to allergies and a little drainage. Then I figured I had a mild virus (there’s always something going around). But it persisted. Yesterday morning I took a look in the mirror, and saw that my uvula was just about the size, shape, and color of a very ripe habanero.

Charming.

I had planned to ride out the weekend, then if my throat was still bugging me to see my usual doc sometime. Instead, I popped over to the clinic. Saw the doc on call. She took one look at my throat, prescribed antibiotics, told me to take it easy.

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I knew that I was just spinning my wheels last week. I didn’t feel all that well. But I was getting some good work done in the bindery, and more or less kept forward momentum going on marketing & promotion, other things.

More importantly, I’ve been doing a *lot* of thinking about St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel to Communion of Dreams which I have mentioned often, but for which I have very little to show at this point.

It is hard to explain how this process works sometimes. But the conscious part of my brain recognized what was happening in my dream last night. How even though the foundation of the book may be laid, it is still necessary to get a handle on all the many different elements I need to work together to complete the thing. Oh, some of the details will sort themselves out as you go along — characters will take on ‘life’ and become real, a metaphor will become clear, that sort of thing — but you have to at least get the major elements in place, or you can never hope to build the book.

And just when you think you have things sorted out, you realize that the task before you is even larger than you realized. There are more factors to consider. More characters to understand.

It’s frustrating. And exciting. And exhausting.

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There’s a new review up on Amazon. Here’s part of it:

I highly recommend this book. It’s exciting, thought provoking, and entertaining. I hope Mr. Downey continues to produce science fiction of such high caliber.

That helps. Thanks.

Jim Downey