In lieu of nightmares

When I was young, I had terrible dreams. Every night, I would wake up in terror and run to the safety and warmth of my mother's room. But eventually, after I had calmed down a bit, I would be sent back to my own bed, and they would be waiting.

My worst dreams recurred; they sunk into me for entire nights or weeks. No matter how many times I managed to wake myself up, as soon as I fell back asleep, I'd be back in the same dream. My waking hours were only a delay, an interlude. I can still remember the most persistent ones.

So, I dreaded bedtime. Alone in the dark, worrying over what I might see. I read for as long as I could to distract myself with other thoughts, hoping they'd permeate and carry me through the night. The best stories did; my mind kept going after I stopped reading. I'd imagine new storylines, possible twists the book could take, delighting in the fact that I could be in control of all of it.

It worked.

A pattern formed. Before I went to sleep, I'd advance my imagined narrative a little bit further, straining to remember each building block developed the night before. I wouldn't wake sweating, I wouldn't run down the hall. These steps were celebrated as marks of maturity and progress, a girl growing up. But more importantly, I was starting to write.

My earliest books are scratches in wide-ruled notebooks. I still have them, drawers full of tattered edges and multi-colored ink. There are even smeared pages where I unwisely elected to use pencil. My heroines fought nightmares, were always surrounded by friends, and toyed with the idea of love.

When I was a teenager, my mother let me keep a computer in my room. It was a bulbous, heavy monitor, stained an off-putting shade of industrial beige. The relic saved my drafts on floppy disks and took at least twenty minutes to boot up. It was too primitive for the Internet, and I never cared. All it had to do was guide me through those excruciating years of confusion, to keep out the nightmares that now lurked in school hallways and online messengers. I loved that computer. But those files were harder to hold onto, now trapped in obsolete technology.

I wrote my first trilogy in the mid-2000s on the fancy family computer that sent emails and had dial-up. I have vague memories of reaching out to publishers without a clue of what I was doing. It makes me laugh now, because I did receive a manuscript request from a publisher, to mail it in of course, but I was too afraid they were going to steal my word document of half-formed themes. I never sent it.

Somewhere along the line, I decided writing was a crutch. Something I no longer needed. I was grown, I had direction. I used the word processor for theses and the kind of useful writing that would get me a job someday. I slept through the night.

But by then, I was already a writer. So when I needed the stories again, they were waiting.