Dream a Little Dream

A dream, from Wikipedia

LUCY BURDETTE: The night following our last REDS AND READERS happy hour in which we discussed our early reading influences, including Nancy Drew, I had such a vivid dream in which I had written an updated Nancy Drew. I was at the book launch event, but I hadn’t prepared a thing and couldn’t remember much about the book. Reds, do you have dreams like this? What are they like?

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s an updated I-have-to-take-an-exam-but-I-haven’t-studied OR I-can’t-find-the-classroom OR… dream 😫

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Mine is turning up for a college or high school class and realizing I haven't written the paper/studied for the test. Go figure…

HANK: AND that I cannot find the room where the test is behind held, and WHY didn’t I study?

RHYS BOWEN: the dream I have is being in a play, waiting backstage and not remembering my lines ! I hunt frantically for the script but can’t find it. Sometimes I step out and deliver lines perfectly, other times I stumble through the scene not knowing what to say next.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: That's my anxiety dream as well, Rhys. My youngest, Ginger, sent me a text yesterday complaining she had had an anxiety dream about Christmas: it was the night before, and  no presents were wrapped, no stockings were hung, and no one had gotten anything for her new boyfriend.

She plaintively concluded, I thought only parents had dreams about messing up Christmas!

JENN MCKINLAY: Ha! My anxiety dream is that I’m ironing a white blouse when I realize I’m two hours late for my first day as a librarian. I’m then torn between finishing the ironing (the shirt is very wrinkled) or running out the door as is! 

JULIA: I'm laughing at Jenn's -  when was the last time any of us ironed a shirt?

JENN: Right? It's ridiculous!!!

RHYS: I also have the college class or exam dream and the Christmas one. I dream it’s Christmas Day, stores are closed and we have people coming for whom I don’t have a present Luckily I took dream psychology in college and these are all too many things on my plate dreams. We all need to slow down. 

And I have never, ever dreamed about ironing. My subconscious knows it wouldn’t happen!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Ironing, no. But for years, I did have dreams about  when the show is about to start and I don't know the lines or the steps or the words to the songs. But recently, I was in the midst of that very stressful dream, and I stopped mid-dream and said to myself, this is a dream, and of course you know the songs and the steps, and even if you don’t, you can manage just fine. And I’ve never had it again.

I am also always dreaming that I find new and gorgeous rooms in my house, filled with beautiful voluptuous things,  and I wonder—oh how did I forget about these? I love these rooms. 

JULIA: Hank, I have that same dream and I also love it. How exciting to find new rooms you didn’t know you had! What I wonder is: do people who haven't done theater have those “I’m going on and I don’t know my lines” dreams? And why, when I spent 21 years in formal education, have I never had a dream where I’m unprepared for class or know nothing about a test? 

Another one you hear of constantly in TV and movies is the alleged “appearing nude in public” dream, and not only have I never had one of these, I’ve asked friends and family, and no one I know has every had that dream. Is it just made up?

Reds, tell us about your dreams and nightmares!

And ps from Lucy, today is the official launch date for the paperback edition of THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS! Find it wherever books are sold...

Covid agitas invades our dreams

HALLIE EPHRON: Normally at this time of year I’d be zipping in and out of airports and giving workshops and talks at conferences. Willamette, Surrey, Writers Digest, Crime Bake, Bouchercon, the Piper Center at ASU, and more. My recurrent nightmare has been that I can’t find my car. I parked it… somewhere… and I’m going to be late wherever it is that I’m going.

Now I keep dreaming that I can’t find what I need in the supermarket. The whole middle of the store has gone missing and been replaced by aisles of luggage and small appliances and who knows what all stuff that I do not need.

No more dreams about lost cars. Not surprising because the only place I’m going these days is… the supermarket. In at 6:30 AM and out as fast as I can.

Meanwhile, my Stop ‘n’ Shop has taken it upon itself to completely reorganize in the store. Last time I was in there, celery, mushrooms, broccoli, scallions and cauliflower were MIA. Butter and coffee have moved halfway across the store. There's no longer a "health foods" section."

It’s as if they threw the entire store up in the air and put everything down somewhere new. Gradually. Over the course of 3 months. It takes triple time to shop.

And they're still at it. Here's what was going on in the meat department at 7 AM this morning.

In my nightmare, I dreamed that I marched up to the customer service desk and chewed out the cashier. (Something which I would never do. I adore the staff at my local Stop ‘n’ Shop.) My husband woke me up because I was shouting.

When I realized what I’d been dreaming, I cracked up laughing. So absurd. But really, my path through the supermarket is one of precious few things that were predictable in an otherwise-gone-bonkers world.

Have your dreams changed since Covid? Are new everyday challenges giving you agitas these days?

LUCY BURDETTE: I haven’t noticed the dreams so much, but waking hours definitely are affected.

We have decided to head south--we have a careful plan about staying with relatives who have bedrooms in their basement and will accept cats and puppies. And I’m planning all our road food.

But John has banned me from buying any more masks. My latest are from Everbrand. They fit really well and don’t fog up my glasses and have some kind of silver treatment on them that’s supposed to kill viruses. (Who knows right?)

So that’s how I’m channeling my anxiety--about everything!

RHYS BOWEN: My dreams have not become disturbing on the whole but very vivid and complicated. The only worrying feature is

that I dream we are keeping a lion or tiger as a pet I’m not happy about it as I realize the danger.

Having studied dream psychology at university I interpret this as having something that could be dangerous in my house with me— the virus. We don’t know where it is so we don’t feel safe.

Oh, and I realize that I am on a lot of trains, a mode of transport that I rarely use. Is my brain saying that flying is unsafe? Am i trying to get somewhere where I’ll be safe?

JENN McKINLAY: I don’t dream. I also don’t sleep. A good night’s rest for me, is five to six hours uninterrupted, but with teenagers and pets that rarely happens. I think that I’m so exhausted by the time I go to bed I’m too weary to remember anything my unconscious is throwing at me, which during these very trying days is probably a blessing.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I have been having terrible dreams. Not every night, but some nights. My dreams are insidious, in that they always start out like very normal life, everyone doing something that they'd ordinarily be doing, and then at some point there's something off--WAIT, I used to know where the door was, or did they change the time of this event, or why can't I find the right building, or what happened to my suitcase, or where did all my clothes go? they used to be in the closet RIGHT HERE and why why why didn't I plan for whatever it is?

I'm always trying to fix things, and as soon as I figure something out, something else goes wrong.

Recently, there's been a scary black-dressed thing

--and I don't mean a person exactly, just a scary thing--at the end of our driveway, which is scaring me just to think about it. I suppose THAT representation is pretty obvious, right? Not so tough to interpret.

And hey, by the way, brain, I don't need dreams to tell me it's scary out there.

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I've been having very vivid and disrupted dreams, too, and a lot of them seem to be about looking for things. In one the other night, I was going through drawers, and in one of them was a very silky black cat, with bright green eyes. Not a stuffed cat, either, a real live cat! In my dream I could feel the texture of its fur. So weird.

I don't have a superstitious thing about black cats, having had several over the years, but it was just...weird.

My Covid agitas is more evident in the daytime, with horrible problems concentrating, and I keep feeling like I have to remind myself to breathe. A walk helps.

HALLIE: Has covid invaded your dreamscape? Please, tell us about it...

Perchance to Dream

RHYS BOWEN:Unless you are like Lucy in Key West, the rest of us are suffering from a large dose of winter! Here in California it is raining and raining and blowing. It's dark and gloomy and all I'd like to do is crawl into bed and hibernate until spring!

However,one of the annoyances of my life these days is that I have trouble sleeping. I find I have a really narrow window of opportunity to fall asleep and it's right around ten o'clock. If I don't take advantage of it and fall asleep then, if I dare to stay awake to watch the rest of a show on TV, then I am still staring at the clock at 2 a:m.

And when I'm on deadline, when I'm stressed, when I'm about to take a trip I can fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night muttering to myself "Wait. She would never have said that!" and there I am, re-writing the chapter in my head. Or I wake having had a nightmare in which the flight is due to leave and I haven't packed my clothes or I don't know where the airport is. And then there I am, staring at the ceiling until it's dawn. I've tried hot milk, melatonin, lavender, and various other natural remedies and nothing works. Ambien works fine but I keep that for when I have crossed time zones and really need a good night's sleep. Advil PM works too, but I'm against taking any drug too frequently.

So is this something you suffer from, darling Reds? And do you have any solutions that work for you and might work for me? Please share.

HALLIE EPHRON: I love to sleep, and it's the opposite for me. If I got to sleep too early, I'm up at 2 or 3 or 4 and it takes hours to fall back to sleep, and yes I'm herding all the anxieties of the day in my head. Packing dreams? Oh boy do I have them.

I'm afraid of sleeping pills. I know too many people who are hooked on them and they make it hard to wake up.

I try not not to drink too much wine at dinner. Two glasses and I fall right to sleep and wake up two hours later. My friend Pat puts on a headset and listens to audio (never music, never a page turner), something marginally engaging but somewhat boring. I do counting things... like trying to remember all the kids in my elementary school. Or all my teachers. Or I wander around my high school in my head -- down corridors, up and down staircases, in and out exits.

RHYS: That would be a nightmare for me, Hallie. I'd be terrified I'd bump into my headmistress. Boy, was she scary and I once knocked her downstairs (not on purpose, of course)

LUCY BURDETTE: I am not a good sleeper, though I was a champion in my youth. I need to try to get to bed reading by 9, and then lights out by 10 or I suffer. I'm rarely able to nap, and I can't sleep in cars or on planes. It doesn't help to have John and Tonka snoring on either side of me (John's in bed, Tonka is not), but they are my beloved peeps so I can't change that. And the cat is an early bird and quite insistent about the rest of us getting up when he wants breakfast!

As for dreams, both John and I have what we call "sh*t" dreams. What can I say? Poop everywhere--ridiculous! And like Rhys, if I'm getting close to the end of a book, ideas start coming in the night. If I don't get up and write them down, they are gone in the am. Maybe it was only gibberish, but it feels like an awful loss...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I don't sleep well, either. I have had restless movement syndrome since I was a kid--I've had all the clinical sleep trials, etc. (Talk about NOT fun.) So for me medication has been a godsend. I take a very low dose (comparatively) of a drug that is given to Parkinson's sufferers, and I do take Ambien sometimes but try to reserve that for really bad nights or across time zone travel. Still, I have a window (mine is about midnight) and if I don't go to sleep then, I am miserably awake until the wee hours. And it's so frustrating when you get those book ideas just when you're drifting off, and you know you have to write them down, but you also know that if you do then you're probably not going to sleep for a couple of hours!

Lucy, poop dreams! That cracks me up!

INGRID THOFT: Oh, sleep, how I love you.  I tend to be a good sleeper.  Some might argue I'm too good at it; in an ideal world, I could sleep nine or ten hours a night!  I tend to go to bed around the same time every night, but do allow myself to sleep in on weekends.  I always hear that elderly people sleep much less.  That should put me around the seven hour mark--a normal amount of sleep for most people--when I'm old and gray.  We always have on a sound soother that plays gentle ocean sounds.  It helps to soften noise from the sirens and trucks in our downtown setting.

I do sleep poorly on occasion, but never for more than a few nights.  I can relate to Hallie's packing dreams.  I have those in spades with all kinds of nifty variations.  It's almost like a writing prompt: You have a small suitcase, a room full of stuff, and the clock is ticking.  What happens next?

HALLIE: And where are the children?! That's always the question in mine.

JENN: Ah, sleep. It's lovely, although I only clock in about five or six hours per night. That seems to be all I need and I can't make myself sleep any longer. I go to bed about midnight, and it's like hitting a light switch. Snap. I am out. I don't dream, well, maybe once a year and then it's a weird recurring dream where I'm ironing an outfit for my first day of work at the library and I'm freaking out because I'm already late, yet I can't stop ironing. I don't wear clothes that require ironing, generally speaking. So, weird, right? I'm also a very deep sleeper. The only thing that wakes me is a sniffle or a cough from my sons' rooms. Otherwise, thunderstorms can roll, neighbors can have loud parties, etc. I sleep through all of it. Okay, right now, I'm a little tired. Oh, and I do take the occasional power nap. Fifteen minutes of being completely out and I'm good to go!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I get in bed, and wham: Asleep. I love to sleep. LOVE. I dream all the time, very elaborate colorful and  complicated, and sometimes blazingly hit you over the head obvious with their not-so-hidden meaning. Like:  had a dream where I was shown my new "house." At the entrance, I was so disappointed, it was not--pretty. But as I went deeper and deeper into the house, it got more and more wonderful, until the last rooms which were fantastic. I said to the person (Who?) "Oh, this is much better. This should be the first room you see."  And the person (who? no idea) said "No--you have to go on the journey to get to the good part."
DUH.
 But as for sleep inducers--if I ever have trouble drifting off, I try to think about being somewhere. LIke on an island, watching the birds fly over. Just watching the birds, then another one, then another one. Just...flying. OR I have an imaginary conversation with someone. If I say this, what will she say? And then what will I say? (Maybe that's SO boring that I just fall asleep.  :-) )  Or-- try thinking about--floating. Just floating.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I had a lot of trouble sleeping when I was going through menopause, but now I'm post-, I do pretty well. My problems are mostly environmental - Ross snores AND has restless leg syndrome (Debs, he's finally seeing a doctor about it! I'm hoping medication will help him, too.) The dog snores - lightly - and we have a drip in the bathroom faucet that we haven't gotten fixed (because it will involve tearing out the whole WWII era plumbing.)

So I lie in bed at night listening to the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore: SNORT! snore Twitch drip SNORT! snore Twitch drip..

RHYS: How about the rest of you? Do you find it hard to sleep? Any suggestions for someone like me who was woken by the storm at four this morning and could never get back to sleep?

It's Only a Dream @MaryKennedybook #giveaway

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm so pleased to introduce my friend Mary Kennedy, who's a practicing psychologist, a mystery writer, and a cat nut (8 cats in her home, count 'em, 8!) (HOW in the world does she manage all that?) I know you'll enjoy this essay about dreams, which gives some insight into her Dream Club mystery series too...

 
MARY KENNEDY: As a psychologist, I spend much of my time listening to my clients talk about their dreams. I always find this part of the session the most fascinating. Sometimes (well, many times!) my clients surprise me. 

A client who appeared shy and reticent confided that she was a Broadway star in her dreams. “Really?” I asked. “What was that like for you?”

Flushing with pleasure she admitted that she loved being in the spotlight, that her social anxiety had vanished and she was thrilled by the applause. We chuckled together at her playing a singer in Dream Girls and we theorized about why she had this particular dream at this time in her life. As it turned out, she was facing a stressful situation. As a newly engaged young lady, her fiancé planned to take her clear across the country to meet his large, extended family. There would be dozens of relatives—plus his parents, of course—to meet her for the very first time. She’d been dreading the big family celebration and felt (quite incorrectly) that she would be judged harshly.

So we explored the idea that this particular dream had given her the chance to “rehearse” being the center of attention. The situation her mind created—starring in a Broadway show—was much bigger than anything she would encounter in real life. But our minds do that when we sleep. They shift through all the story possibilities and come up with something that is often more “over the top” than the real life situation the dreamer is facing. 

She was so dazzled by her “Broadway show dream” that she wished she would have it again. I noticed she appeared more relaxed and outgoing than usual. When I asked her if she still felt the same trepidation about meeting her finance’s family, she smiled and said, “Well, I guess there’s  always the possibility they will like me.”  The story ended happily. Her visit went amazingly well, she had no anxiety and made a hit with her in-laws. 

In any case, it’s fun to explore our dreams and what they really mean, as the characters in the Dream Club do. The members like to think that they are uncovering clues to solving murders in Savannah and they seem to have had some success. They combine intuition with solid sleuthing skills and some dream work. But do clues from their dreams really solve crimes? Is it luck, or coincidence or a combination of the two?  I leave it to the reader to decide. 

Mary Kennedy is the author of over forty novels and has made the BookScan, Barnes and Noble and Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list. She is a psychologist in private practice on the East Coast and lives with her husband and eight neurotic cats. Both husband and cats have resisted all her attempts to psychoanalyze them, but she remains optimistic. You can visit her at www.marykennedynet or the Cozy Chicks where she blogs every Saturday. 

And leave a comment and your email to be entered in a drawing for either Nightmares Can Be Murder or a honeysuckle candle.

Dream a Little Scream will be out on August 4. Nightmares Can Be Murder, the first in The Dream Club Mysteries, can be found here.
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The Meaning of Dreams

RHYS: Do you dream? Well, of course they say that everyone does. But do you remember your dreams? My husband doesn't and swears he doesn't dream. But I've always had particularly vivid dreams--some scary and some spectacular as in the days when I dreamed I was flying.
In the old days dreams were seen as portends--remember good old Joseph and the seven fat cows and seven thin cows?

It was only recently with Freud and the advent of modern psychology that it was realized that dreams are a portal to the subconscious mind. I took a course on dream psychology when I was at university and I was absolutely hooked. Of course Freud saw all dream symbols as related to sex but more modern thought has found that there are universal dream symbols all over the world. Appearing naked in public, being in a runaway vehicle, being chased by a monster are common to all humans.  Also symbols like the house. If you dream you are in a house, that house often represents you and how you view yourself.  If it's a palace, you think well of yourself. If it has dark rooms you don't want to go into, there are parts of yourself you are afraid to reveal.

Of course we also have dreams where the mind is in freefall and images are just random and silly but in the earlier part of the night we will have our significant dreams. If they are recurring, it's good to analyze them. Some are obvious like my recurring dream of having to pack too many suitcases in a rush or miss my flight. I've been in a car that runs backward down a hill. I've been standing in the wings ready to go onstage and realize I don't know my lines.  All famliar?

If you can't make out what the dream is telling you, write it down or tell it to someone else. Usually you will use language that explains the dream. Example: an English friend told me she has this recurring dream about being in Marks and Spencer's (the department store) and wanting to buy things but it's almost closing time and the racks are almost empty. I told her that was easy to solve by the words she chose. She had told me she wanted to go to art college but her father wouldn't let her. Now she was considering going back to art school. But had she left it too late?  It clue was that she was in a place where you get MARKS (the English word for grades)  Fun, huh?

This fascination with dreams led to my new Molly book, THE EDGE OF DREAMS, that came out last week. The story hinges on Freud's recently published Interpretation of Dreams being able to help solve a baffling crime with a young girl who survived a fire, remembers nothing, but is plagued by vivid nightmares. If they unlock the symbols in her dream they will know what happened.

So fellow reds and readers do you have recurring dreams? Have you be able to unlock their meaning?

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh Rhys, that is completely fascinating. What a splendid premise.

I dream that I'm packing and I can't possibly get everything packed in time and get to the bus station or train station or airport. No mystery what that's about. Anxiety. I also have yard sale dreams. Those I love. No idea what they mean.

RHYS: I have the same packing dream, Hallie. But yard sale? Could that mean that you're doubting the value of what you have to offer? Are your books good enough or perhaps a hidden gem? Or could it be that your husband LOVES yard sales so the topic comes up frequently?

LUCY BURDETTE: I can't wait to read this Freud book, Rhys. As a psychologist, I KNOW that dreams are important. I can recall many moments (as both a patient and a therapist) when a dream unlocked the door to understanding and clearing away a knotty problem.

The most frequently recurring dream I have these days is expecting guests and spending what seems like hours trying to figure out where they could all possibly stay. I don't suppose that has to do with living in Key West during a winter that was awful for so many others?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I used to have the ready to go on stage and don't know lines dream. Then one night, in the dream, I said -"This is a DREAM. So I'm not worried. And anyway, I DO know the lines. Well enough, at least."  Never had it again.
I do still dream I can't get somewhere, and can't figure out why. Last night I dreamed there were lots of spiders and we had to wear plastic suits to protect ourselves. (Lucy, Rhys, anything?)
  My favorite is my house dream. I have it all the time. I'm in my own house, but it's not my current house, or any real house, but it's absolutely mine, and there's a door in the back of my closet (not to Narnia) which I ALWAYS forget about. I go through it, and there's a whole room of beautiful  wonderful stuff, all in narrow mahogany drawers, like map drawers. Scarves, and shawls, velvets, and paisley wools, and pearls, all beautiful wonderful things. I think--why do I always forget this is here? And I am so happy! Sometimes, in the morning, I groggily think I should go look for it. It is incredibly real.
But then, so were the spiders.
(And I am reading your wonderful book right now!)

RHYS: Not sure about the spiders. I think we all have our monster/creepy things dreams but you're obviously good at protecting yourself with the plastic suit. I'd just have run away screaming. But the house....you are quite content with the person you are. Fulfilled. Excellent.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I have the house dream, too, Hank, and if I recall aright, Lucy told us that meant a sense of many possibilities. Either that, or we want to move...  I often have dreams where I'm about to get information I need from someone, or from a book, and then I wake up and am incredibly frustrated that I can't recall what the answer was.

RHYS: I was taught that the house means our perception of ourselves.

JULIA: You know who has interesting dreams? Ross. He has these action-adventure dreams that sound, when he recounts them, like a Bruce Willis movie. I'll hear him making noises and twitching, and wake him to discover I just saved him from a pit of crocodiles he had to cross to rescue his captured platoon. Not even lying.  It's too bad he has no facility for fiction - clearly he has the imagination to be another Clive Cussler.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have house dreams, too! I will be in a house that is nothing like anywhere I've ever lived or any house I've seen, but I know it's MY house. I'm always going into new rooms and finding new things. These dreams are so vivid that I feel shocked when I wake up and it's not real. I would suspect that my subconscious is telling me I have interesting and unexpected things left to discover--tailor-made for a writer:-)

Julia, Rick has the same kind of action/adventure dreams. He said they almost never contain anyone he knows, and that it's like watching a movie. Wonder if it's a male/female thing?

RHYS: So please share your interesting dreams with us--recurring dreams, dreams you've been able to interpret and dreams you've never managed to figure out. I'm going to give a copy of THE EDGE OF DREAMS to the most interesting comment of the day!

Mary Kennedy Dreams a Little Dream

RHYS BOWEN: When I met fellow writer Mary Kennedy I was instantly drawn to her new series because it's all about the interpretation of dreams and a Dream Club. I've always been fascinated by dreams and was hooked when I did a course on dream psychology when I was studying at the University of Freiburg in Germany. And I put this knowledge to good use when I wrote my upcoming Molly Murphy book called THE EDGE OF DREAMS. The story hinges on understanding a young girl's vivid dreams after a horrible crime, thanks to Professor Freud's recent treatise on interpreting dreams..
So Mary's book is right up my alley, so to speak. But I'll let her tell you about it.....

MARY KENNEDY:


What Do Your Dreams Really Mean?

Dreams are amazing, ephemeral and fun.

As a psychologist, I enjoy listening to my clients’ dreams and I’m grateful to have a window into their world. Their dreams teach me so much about their unconscious fears and desires, their most hidden emotions. When I read about the popularity of dream clubs in the northeast, I thought it would be a great idea for a mystery series and I wrote Nightmares Can be Murder, the first in the Dream Club Mysteries (Penguin, Sept 2,2014).

A dream club is like a book club except the topic is dreams.  In Nightmares Can Be Murder, business consultant Taylor Blake has returned to Savannah, Georgia, to help her sister Allison  run an old-fashioned candy store.  Allison is interested in dream interpretation and forms the Dream Club where members meet once a week to share their dreams (and solve a murder or two!)

Are dreams really the “royal road to the unconscious,” as Freud suggested? Can they give us insight into our deepest thoughts and unspoken wishes? Or are they simply random firings of neurons as the brain rests and recharges itself, processing the day’s events?  Do the dream club members really uncover clues in their dreams that expose the killers? Or are they just lucky coincidences? I leave it to the reader to decide.
Mary Kennedy is a licensed psychologist in private practice and lives in the northeast with her husband and eight eccentric cats. The cats have resisted all her attempts to psychoanalyze them but she remains optimistic. You can learn more at www.marykennedy.net or at the Cozy Chicks where she blogs every Saturday. www.cozychicksblog.com

 

 

http://www.marykennedy.net -visit Mary's website.
Nightmares Can Be Murder, the first in The Dream Club Mysteries,  http://tinyurl.com/kloqok3
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Follow Mary on Twitter https://twitter.com/marykennedybook
Link with Mary on Linked In  http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=10658765&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile
Mary blogs every Saturday with the Cozy Chicks. http://www.cozychicksblog.com


RHYS: And Mary will be stopping by to chat and will give away a copy to one lucky commenter today.

Childhood's End

First, headlines! 

The winner of THE BLACK HOUR is mauisun411! Email Hank h ryan at whdh dot com with your address--and congratulations!

THE OTHER WOMAN is now just $2.99 on all e platforms! But not for long. http://www.HankPhillippiRyan.com

and now: 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  It's Saturday morning, and as we learned yesterday from Lori Rader-Day, there'll be no more binge-watching of cartoons. But that just gives us more time to listen to a great story.

A story of a different kid of childhood. Maybe--with no cartoons.

Today Lisa Alber spins us quite the intriguing tale. Again, about being at a certain place at a certain time.  A tale of her childhood, and how it haunts her dreams today, and how it changed her life.

The Mystery I’d Most Like to Solve

                  by Lisa Alber

Picture this: Six-year-old Little Lisa (LL for short) sits on an olive-green recliner. She’s waiting to walk to school with an older neighbor girl, Laura Parrish, who is in fifth grade. Every day LL tries to slip past Laura’s house by skulking behind parked cars. Sometimes she makes it and gets to walk to school alone even though she’s too young for that. Most often, she’s caught out and banished to the gloomy living room while Laura finishes her breakfast. The musty curtains are always closed, the shag rug always un-vacuumed. LL makes a game of bouncing her hands off her thighs in different rhythms. It’s hard—her hands want to sync up—but over time she improves. She does this so she doesn’t have to think too much about who’s down the murky hallway.

The scary brothers just home from a war in Vietnam.

There’s something wrong with them, something wrong with the mom who plays guitar and sings “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head,” something wrong with the buttoned-up businessman dad, and, most of all, something wrong with Laura, who pees her bed.

Of course, Little Lisa doesn’t know this consciously; she senses the wrongness of everything about this house. Knows that this house is in some fundamental way not a safe place for little girls.

***

Wow, Hank, when you asked me to write a post for Jungle Reds, I expected to keep it light. This memory arrived instead. But at least I know why.

It’s this: The other day I got to thinking about the inevitability of me writing mystery/crime fiction rather than, say, romance or women’s fiction. Inevitable because the mystery of Laura has followed me around since I was a kid. To this day, for example, I dream about murky, inescapable houses when I’m under stress. It’s my go-to anxiety dream.

As for my writing, I gravitate toward stories about families with secrets. I often incorporate moody buildings—or some other thick, cloying environmental factor—in my stories. And since my first impression of the world outside my home was one laden with danger, I guess it’s not surprising that I’d write stories about dangerous situations.

I’ve tried to find Laura over the years. Every once in a while I Google her name. About a decade ago, I visited the old neighborhood and realized that I’d remembered her home address, 5 Dellwood Court, but not my own. I knocked on the front door, hoping that somehow a Parrish still lived there. Where’s Laura? I’d ask. What’s she doing? Did she end up OK—or a drug addict—or worse? And, most of all, what the hell was going on in her effed-up household?!?

There was even the time about, oh, eight years ago when, in a fit of despair, I set aside what would become my debut novel, Kilmoon, and started a new piece, in which, yes, I tried to solve the mystery of Laura through fiction. Writing that novel led to the revelation that I’d suffered from PTSD as a child. Seriously. Is that crazy, or what?

(Aside: We moved away from the neighborhood when I was seven—thank goodness; life saver!)

Am I sad or bitter about my less-than-bucolic early childhood? Nah. I’m fascinated. 

I’m fascinated by psychology, in general, and by how we become the adults we turn out to be. I can be anxious and high-strung—you spend enough time in an oppressive house in which amputee’d, drug-addled men (with PTSD no doubt) jump out of closets at you—well, so it goes.

In the end, Laura was probably as big an influence on my early development as my parents. For all I know, I have Laura to thank for my writing life because while I sat on that dingy recliner bouncing my hands against my thighs, I used to sink deep into other worlds. I Iived in imaginary worlds.

So, thank you, Laura. I hope you’re OK out there somewhere. You’re still the mystery I would most like to solve.

Jungle Redians, do you have a life-long mystery you wish you could solve? Or some remnant from your childhood that still follows you around? How do you think this influenced your development—and writing life, if you’re a writer?

HANK: Well, I still watch for tornadoes, as I used to when I was a kid, all the result of Wizard of Oz, of course.  I dream of houses, too, but they are lovely. Which I  think makes yours even more fascinating. But you know as a writer, I always worry when I can't give someone a happy ending, or when I have to write about someone saying goodbye. I know, absolutely, where in my childhood that came from. 

How about you, Reds?

******************************

About KILMOON

Californian Merrit Chase travels to Ireland to meet her father, a celebrated matchmaker, in hopes that she can mend her troubled past. Instead, her arrival triggers a rising tide of violence, and Merrit finds herself both suspect and victim, accomplice and pawn, in a murderous game that began thirty years previously. Family secrets, betrayal, and vengeance from beyond the grave—Merrit has just discovered her long-lost father.

This first in Alber’s new County Clare Mystery series is utterly poetic … The author’s prose and lush descriptions of the Irish countryside nicely complement this dark, broody and very intricate mystery.

     —RT Book Reviews (four stars)

In her moody debut, Alber skillfully uses many shades of gray to draw complex characters who discover how cruel love can be.

     —Kirkus Reviews

Brooding, gothic overtones haunt Lisa Alber’s polished, atmospheric debut. Romance, mysticism, and the verdant Irish countryside all contribute to making Kilmoon a marvelous, suspenseful read.”

     —Julia Spencer-Fleming, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of
          Through the Evil Days

Lisa Alber received an Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant based on Kilmoon. Ever distractible, you may find her staring out windows, dog walking, fooling around online, or drinking red wine with her friends. Ireland, books, animals, photography, and blogging round out her distractions. Lisa lives in the Pacific Northwest. She is currently at work on her second novel set in Ireland.

You can find Lisa at: website | Facebook | Twitter | blog

What Rhys is doing... probably sleeping.

RHYS BOWEN: If my post isn't quite as coherent as the preceding ones, I beg your indulgence. I just got home an hour ago from the last part of my book tour, after a three hour delay at the airport, due to bad weather in San Francisco. I have been on the road for most of the month of March, promoting my new Molly Murphy book, CITY OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

Which means, of course, that I haven't been able to do any writing for the past month. This has been quite frustrating as my next Molly Murphy book is due on May 1st and I have about 40 pages left to go.

 I find the pattern with each of my books is the same. I don't outline. I start out not knowing much. In this case I knew the driving force behind the books was Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. This was a new theory at the time--that the symbols in our dreams can be a window to our subconscious. In my new book (which doesn't yet have a title, I'm afraid) a house has burned down, killing the occupants, but the daughter has been found safe and curled up in the back garden, apparently asleep. She has no recollection of what happened but is having vivid and terrifying nightmares. Molly's friend is called in to unlock these dreams.

So I start not knowing much. The first fifty pages of every book are pure panic. I tell myself that this story will never take shape, I'll be revealed as a failure and a phony. But I soldier on. As I approach 100 pages I see the story starting to form. At 150 I know where we're going. I breathe a sigh of relief. Then it's like a snowball gathering momentum as it runs downhill. I can't write fast enough. I'm dying to get to the story finished. So you can understand that it's been so frustrating for me to be so near the end and yet not able to finish it. At least I know what's about to happen and now I'll be able to sit at my desk and get it done. Then comes the polishing. The complete rewrite. The hard work.

I wanted to show you a little of where I'm up to, but I realized I didn't want to give away any of the plot twists that are going to shake up readers at the end of this book. So you're only going to get a few lines.

I felt relieved, almost elated as I came out of the building. I hadn’t been the one targeted after all. It had been Marcus Deveraux. And Daniel would have arrested the tutor and we could all breathe easier. I went home and resumed wifely duties, ironing my husband’s shirts and feeding my son his midday meal.

            We had only just begun to eat when Daniel himself came in, sending a great gust of wind racing down the hall before him.

            “This is a nice surprise,” I said, getting up to greet him. “What are you doing home at this hour?”  The question ended warily because I had just remembered that his job was in jeopardy.

            “I came to see if you’d like to go on a little trip with me tomorrow,” he said.

            “A trip—where?”

            “Up to a place called Stoney Creek.”

            “What for? What’s in Stoney Creek.”

            “Not exactly in it. A couple of miles outside it, apparently. It’s a private institution for the insane, where Edward Deveraux was locked away. I thought I should take a look for myself and I’d appreciate another pair of sharp eyes.”

             “Of course, I’d love to come,” I said. “Where is this?”

            “North of Albany. We’d get off the train at Lake George and have to find transportation from there,” he said. He turned to his mother. “You can handle the boy for a day, can’t you, Mother?”

            Daniel’s mother had already risen to her feet when he came in and was busy loading food onto a plate for him.  She put it onto the table and indicated that he should sit and eat. As usual he complied, pulling out a chair and sinking onto it.

“She’s been handling Liam ever since she arrived,” I answered for her. “An absolute godsend. And Bridie’s a big help.”

            “I expect we’ll manage all right,” Mrs. Sullivan said evenly as she put a glass of water next to her son’s place, “Only I’m not sure it’s wise taking Molly on a jolting train ride after what she’s been through.”

            “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Almost healed.” Of course I really wanted to go and would never have admitted to the ache that still nagged at my side. I sat down again opposite Daniel as he took a bite of his meat pie.  “But why now? Has something new transpired?”

So this was where I left it before I set off on a month long cross country jaunt. It's hard to get back into the feel of what I was writing, but I expect I'll be all right after a good night's sleep... in my own bed at last. And as for the title--I had tentatively called it Beautiful Dreamer. My editor and agent felt it wasn't edgy enough. So suggestions please. Something with the word Dream/dreamer/sleep in it, but with an edge. A copy of City of Darkness and Light for the best suggestion.

Rhys flies by the seat of her pants.

RHYS BOWEN: There are two types of writers: the outliners and the pantsers. The former plot out entire books. They do character studies and know what they are going to write about before they start.
The latter (which include me) fly by the seat of their pants.  We start knowing almost nothing. We begin writing and hope a story will materialize. And strangely enough it always seems to.

I always know the environment in which I want to set the mystery. I s.ay to myself 'wouldn't it be fun to set a story within the art world of the Paris post-Impressionists and send Molly there? Then I find a way to do it. don't always know who is going to be murdered or whodunit. 

I have now written thirty one mysteries and I am still in a complete state of panic for the first fifty pages. I am plagued with doubts--will this really turn into a good story? What if I say everything I want to in less that one hundred pages? What if I can't finish it? So I stumble along and then my characters start taking over and I find myself tiptoeing after Molly or Georgie, anxious to see what scrapes they are going to get themselves into this time.

I realize that writing an outline first would make life more comfortable for me. But I'm afraid that once I got the storyline down on paper I'd lose interest. And I'd know what was going to happen. I'd be the puppet master, forcing my characters to obey my will. The way I write I'm as surprised and excited as Molly or Georgie when strange things happen and we go off on tangents, when there is a knock on the door and an unexpected person is standing there.

I've just reached that blissful hundred page mark on my new Molly book and I'm heaving a sigh of relief. Yes we have a good story and it's going somewhere and it's just up to me to keep up with Molly's pace. The driving idea behind this story is Freud's book on the interpretation of dreams. One of Molly's friends has returned from studying with Freud with Vienna and is called upon to help a young girl who has survived a fire that killed her parents, but remembers nothing of the event. Since then she is plagued by nightmares and it is hoped that they might reveal exactly what happened that night.

I decided to tackle this story as I studied dream psychology at the University of Freiburg in Germany and have been fascinated ever since. It's going to be a very complicated puzzle, tying in with a case that Daniel is working on. I hope that Molly is in top form and able to solve it!

Here's an excerpt I've written this week:

My first impression of her was that I was looking at a French bisque doll with enormous blue eyes and corn-colored hair. She was so pale that she almost merged into the whiteness of the pillows behind her head. She sat up and looked at us with apprehension as we crowded into her small bedroom.

                “Hello Polly.” Gus took the initiative. “I’m Augusta, and these are my friends Molly and Elena.  Your aunt asked us to come because we heard you’d been having nightmares since the awful tragedy.  Your aunt wondered if I could help you, because I’ve been learning about how to interpret dreams.”

                “My aunt told me,” Polly said.

                “May I sit down?” Gus said, pulling up a chair beside the bed. “And my friends can sit on the window seat in the sun, unless you’d prefer that they wait in another room while we have our talk?”

                “It’s all right. They can stay,” Polly said in a resigned voice.

                We sat.  Shafts of sunlight painted stripes on the flowered wallpaper, highlighting the only color in the otherwise white room.

                I could tell that Gus didn’t know how to begin.

                “Polly,” I said. “We were so sorry to learn about your parents.  What an awful thing to have lived through. It’s no wonder you are having bad dreams."

She sat in silence for a while then she said,  “I can’t believe they are gone. I just didn’t believe it when Aunt Minnie told me. I mean, not my Papa. How could it be? He was so big and strong. I keep expecting to hear the front door slam and his big voice yelling, “Where’s my Pollywog?”

She looked down at her sheet, smoothing it with a tiny white hand.  “I keep asking myself ‘how could I get out and he didn’t?”

“You don’t remember getting out?” Gus said. “Maybe there was a fire escape outside your window and not outside theirs?”

She shook her head. “It was the other way around. The fire escape was outside their window, not mine.  And I don’t remember anything at all. Not the fire. Not getting out. Nothing until I woke up and these faces were over me and someone said ‘she’s alive. God be praised.’”

“So how do you think you got out?” Gus asked.

“I’ve no idea. Unless I walked in my sleep. “

“Do you walk in your sleep sometimes?” Gus asked.

“Sometimes. I used to more when I was little. But how could I not have woken up if there was a fire and flames all around me?”

“Polly, is it possible that you walked in your sleep and….” I started to say, then shut up again. “No, never mind. It’s not important.”  I had been going to ask whether she might have knocked over their lamp by accident or even lit a match, tried to light a fire, and all without knowing it. But I realized as I said it that this was a burden I couldn’t lay on her. She was already carrying enough guilt that she had lived and they had not.

There was another awkward silence that seemed to go on forever.

“Tell me about your mother, Polly,” Sid said. “You must miss her dreadfully.”

Polly pressed her lips together and I could tell she was willing herself not to cry. “ Mama was so soft and gentle. She always used to braid my hair for me. Aunt Mnnie never does it right and she jerks my head with the hairbrush. Mama never did. And she let me climb into bed with them when I had bad dreams.”

“Have you always had bad dreams?” Gus asked.

“I’ve had them sometimes, you know, the way one does. But not like this. These are so vivid and horrible and when I wake up I don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep and what is real and what is not.”

                “Can you tell me about any of them?” Gus asked.

                “It’s hard.” Polly looked flustered now. “They are so real at the time but when I try to remember, it’s all so unclear.”

                “Tell me about the first one,” Gus said gently. “What is the one thing you remember—the one thing that made you afraid.”

                “The snake,” Polly said firmly. “There is always the snake.”

 

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER will be published March 2015. And if you need a Molly fix before then, CITY OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT comes out in four weeks time, on March 4th. (and yes, it's the one where Molly goes to Paris)