Book of Nightmares

NathanielLucas

Mon, Sep 30, 11:00 PM (6 days ago)

to me

Hi James, I just finished reading your book of nightmares and was pleasantly surprised to see the dedication. You do me too much honour.

Australians named Lucas appearing in your dreams can't be a coincidence even if they are animals. I really enjoyed the grocery store dreams especially the one with your mate Scott and the black customers. I like these short reads and hope you will do more of them. Maybe a book of pleasant dreams?

Coming from a very different social matrix than yourself my dreams take the form of casual acquaintances spouting bizarre nonsense or people beloved to me meeting each other across the rim of death and decades. I rarely have nightmares of the waking up breathing heavy variety, more puzzling juxtapositions and situations.

I hope you're well.

Nathan

Nathan, the dreams that are not nightmares that might come to me in some future plagued by actual REM cycles, if I care to remember them, will most likely be used as dream sequences for fictional and historical characters. I have used my dreams and nightmares in the past to empathize with fictional characters and should do much of this if I am able to finish these horrid Plantation America history tomes.

Thanks for the advice on the length of the work. I am weary of writing huge books and have no intention of writing beyond novella length in the future for the fiction market. I intend to keep most of my fiction at novelette length works, published in 5 by 8 inch books of 78 to 132 pages, with 96 pages being ideal. I want readers, busy as they are and assailed by internet reading prompts, to be able to read the entire story on their day off, without taking more than four hours, or to be able to read one chapter a night or on their lunch break at 20 minutes a stretch and be able to finish the book in a week in that fashion.

The history books and dissident journals, well, they will remain 200 to 700 page monstrosities, but dwindle in number, as I retire into a winter-inversion story teller and mythologist and darkness casts Her inky talons over your fields of woked verse.

If the reader hasn't gotten a chance to, read Nathan's For My People and other poems—an enjoyable provision of a daily verse for the mind targeted by our world perverse.

For My People and other poems