The Dream That Came Undreamed

Ever since my childhood, I have wanted to write fiction.  And, specifically, I have wanted to write in the field of science fiction and fantasy.  People tell me that I am a good writer.  Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  Successful fiction writers are filled with story ideas just waiting to burst out.  I almost never get any ideas for stories, and on the rare occasions that I do get ideas they are often more suited to a visual medium like television than to the written word.  Thus, although I would like to write, I generally have nothing to write.  

The one exception to this problem comes from my dreams.  Every so often I will have a dream that arranges itself into a narrative, or suggestions of a narrative.  

Years ago, perhaps fifteen or more years ago, I had one such dream.  In the dream, I was in eighth grade.  Another boy and I decided to skip class and go to Las Vegas, which was conveniently located next to the school.  There we saw a sign saying that on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft high above the city would release two million ears of corn, which would burn up in the atmosphere, creating an artificial meteor shower.

An artificial meteor shower lighting up the Las Vegas sky on New Year’s Eve seemed like a good basis for a science fiction story.  I carried the concept around in my head for a long time, and a few years ago I started trying to develop a narrative around the concept.  (One immediate change that I made was to turn the ears of corn to grains of sand.)  But since I had a lot of other things to do, and very little self-discipline, I never got very far with the story.  

Then about a year ago I came upon an article on the internet reporting that a Japanese company is planning to implement an artificial meteor shower in the Hiroshima area in early 2019.  (A more recent account places the meteor shower in early 2020.)  Instead of ears of corn or grains of sand, specially-concocted pellets will be used to provide multiple colors.  

Normally one considers a dream coming true to be a good thing.  But in this case, my dream is robbed of its prescience, and thus of its effectiveness as a science fiction story. 

And so ideas become rarer still.

Three Weeks into September

It's hard to believe that it's twenty-one days into September. Not only is summer gone, but fall is already more than one-sixth over.  (I go by meteorological summer, and not astronomical summer, as I mentioned earlier.)  Now the air grows cool and the evenings grow dark; this spooky time of year makes me think that I should write a scary story, and try to get it published.  And some years I will start a story, but I never finish it, because I don't have the energy, and I don't really have any stories to tell.  

It always makes me a little sad when the summer ends.  It might be because the kids have to go back to school, and I  can still remember what it's like to have three months of freedom, and then feel it slip away.  But maybe more than that, I know that the end of summer means that the season for reptile and amphibian observations will be coming to an end soon.  I am happy to say that I did meet one of my herpetological goals for the summer.  I had my first field encounter with the Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea).  I didn't see any, but I heard them calling one night at Huntley Meadows in Fairfax County.  I made some audio recordings, and maybe one day I will figure out if it's possible to post them on the blog.