Nightmares, and strange dreams, even writemares, in which I am writing in the dream space and being tricked, foiled, teased, released from weird captivity, and even interviewed by weeds in suits due to my crime of meditating while weeding my host’s yards, have continued to draw me awake this past year. Timejacker began as a novel born in a dream, after having been framed by a phone conversation with Mister Gray, a man with whom I authored the novel Hemavore. He is also the man that suggested Reverent Chandler and the trilogy Night Song of the Nords.
That man has a strong hold on my creative consciousness. Let’s not call it creative, but weirdly mogrific. As a writer trapped in dream I most recently had a knife fight with a bald man in dressed for a day in the Bahamas in a small Pennsylvania river town. His minions numbered a dozen or so blond teenage thugs. I was riding as a passenger in a gigantic truck driven by Mister Gray. The scenes are vivid in the mind when I wake. Then, returning to sleep, it continues. I used to, after finishing a book, get drunk to wipe my memory of some narratives. These do not help history writing or the type of commentary that I actually make a living on. But, I can no longer safely get that drunk. I have been blacking out, not recalling how I got to the couch or bed where I woke. Hence, numerous story lines battle in the brain. I have great difficulty forgetting historical material I have worked on. It tends to get stuck in there until it is extruded by more historical material. But a novel, I can usually clear it from my mind, minus a few scenes, by the expedient of completing writing it. This is one reason why I do not wish to spend time editing and publishing a novel I have written. I’m glad to be rid of it.
The dreams themselves have a single protagonist, myself, usually with no co protagonist, the space occupied mostly by foes and a few bystanders or wayfarers. I refuse to write novels, to execute these story lines from my perspective. It is too much of the same drear perspective, like writing all of the novels set in one city. So, I have taken, particularly with Timejacker and its sequels, to using people I know as the protagonists, and also as supporting characters.
These decisions are based on those people appearing in the dreams as advisors, companions and sometimes objects of a coming journey or recent stay. Authenticity of story is another reason for this. In making a character, one is tempted to craft a character to fit a yarn, or the yarn to fit the character. This is in fact standard practice by accepted novelists. But I am trying to arrive at the most realistic behavior, especially within a story line, that is on the face, crazy, such as time travel. In this way I am liberated by the friends I have cast as characters by such expedients as, ‘What would Banjo do? This is superior to, ‘What should Banjo do?’ or, ‘What should Banjo not do, so I can use that imposed incongruity to generate more peril or a trick ending?’
That last is the standard for writing horror, especially for a screenplay.
As Scott would say, “Fuck that!”
Sergeant Crook and Major Pitt are men who have appeared as judges, gurus, bosses and even hecklers in various of my dreams. So, they were obvious choices for Timejacking agents. Employing [I didn’t want to say “using” my friends, so used the French term for using—you see this here is not her material] a known person, whose reactions and mode of speech are known to me over years, also conserves creative energy for the creation and adaptation of antagonistic characters, future settings and societies, and for the crafting of first person perspectives among the inhabitants of these futures.
Scott Grumman is a man who sees the world more like I do than any other person I know. I likewise wrote a memoir of his youth in a book titled My Younger Self. This helps me do him as a teen age character. This also jives with my dream sense, as I still see the world largely from rebelliously unassimilated eyes.
Banjo is a man who appears in my dreams walking away, or clattering up a rock slide off screen in scenes where my mind is stuck on the far side of the dream, as if peeking into a TV screen. He has been homeless after being driven out of an American city by on duty cops working as enforcers for a wealthy man. Banjo is a far better man than I am. At his age I was afraid of being homeless, and he embraces it on principle.
Banjo once asked me to investigate a woman’s vanishing in Portland, a girl he knew. I could not bring myself to do it. I knew one man, so I asked him if he knew her—end of investigation. I have never asked questions of strangers without great trepidation. I never reach out, not even to help fallen people, stranded women, lost children or injured elderly. I turn away from strangers, and only help my own.
Banjo is the kind of man that does. So I cast him as a worthy protagonist in my terrible dream. A woman on a plane from Utah, whose son had been murdered during the Baltimore Riots in 2015, whose husband had died of cancer and whose daughter was murdered by the BALTIMORE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT for insisting they investigate her brother’s death, asked me to investigate the extermination of her blood line, of her children. I wrote a single article and buried that heroic notion. When Banjo was in a similar situation, he went against the legal system. He has also advocated for people in other places. When a gang of criminal police began hunting him, and seeking him by no legal name, but by his nickname, I suggested he leave town, and he did.
Therefore, I make my appearance in Banjo Timejack, as Old Stump. That character is a composite of myself and of Stump, my stepfather, who was a reprehensible shithead, but a better boxer than I.
I am haunted by the reoccurring weed dream, and am resisting framing it as its own novel. That friction may hurt other works. I will not place it in Timejacker, as it does not belong craft wise, being off topic, the topic being Chronological Race War. This might be my own sub-genre here, one I am sure other writers will leave alone.
The mechanics of time travel as presented in Timejacker come from a podcast by Andrew Edwards, a man who I have met, trained with and recorded with, who pointed out that our dreams are not ours, that we are not The Dreamer. This suggested, as a time travel device, dream itself, in the form of a harnessed dreamer, one who is separate from the hero, who is something of a writer, a vehicle, a weird weaver taking a turn upon the Loom of Time for a single shift. These persons must be creative, not repetitive, personalities. Ideally, these dreamers would be writers: Hunter S. Thompson, Jack London, Robert E. Howard, who died in their prime or by their own hand or both, souls that might serve as a navigator for a time vehicle, lesser souls, perhaps only as a pilot to get the crew out of a harbor or off a lee shore.
This is the means by which suggestions by fellow writers are written through the good characters of my fellow fighters. Timejacker is an attempt to re-frame the dreams that have drawn in what remains of a boy who a half century ago did little other than dream in hopes that the Great Weaver’s loom might not leave him purposeless in Her yarn bin.
