So, of course, I’m loving it. Unlike other writers, I don’t flee the frost — then again, I don’t have to walk a dog or carry it up and down stairs, either. Neither have I won the Newberry Medal. Perhaps there’s a correlation?

This might just be the case. My writing time over the past month or so has been disrupted by a frustrating bundle of interruptions and accidents, too numerous to mention here. It hasn’t helped that much of my time has been spent preparing and revising submission materials — easily my most hated task by far, as it feels exactly like the opposite of writing. But it is also Playing By The Rules in order to make a connection with the right sort of agent to represent my work. And with two books done and a third one on the way, I’m not quite ready to give that up just yet. Not quite.

Speaking of books and weather… I should also mention that The Winter Chap is still available. Originally, I’d planned to limit the Chaps and retire each preceding season once the new one was available. However, people are still discovering it and buying a copy (you could be one of them) so I’ve decided to leave them out there. Which means Winter is going to remain available for purchase once The Spring Chap is released in early February.

A few people have asked me why I’m doing the Chaps (a question I much prefer to be asked in writing rather than having it spoke in, say, a crowded shop) and it really comes down to vanity. I’ve got a lot of odd little bits and pieces which might never see the light of day otherwise. There’s short stories and poems and other oddments that don’t quite fit anywhere else, so this is a way for people to discover them on their own. And the price isn’t so bad for fifty or so pages of unpublished stories and poems, really. I myself have spent far more on much less.

It’s perhaps worth noting that, at the end of the day, only a dollar of that lands in my threadbare pockets. The rest of the asking price goes to feed the little children whom, I imagine, Ms. Lulu has enslaved to do her bidding. See their tiny hands laced with paper cuts banging away on staplers and saddle-stich machines? Is six bucks and some change too much to ask that their efforts not be in vain? I think not.

I’ve got about forty-seven tabs open in Firefox right now, all sorts of little interesting things that caught my attention over the past few weeks. Here’s a few to help to while away the long, dark hours of winter…

…Alan Moore’s writing another volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and this time it’s a musical — which is either baffling or genius, possibly both…

…we have a new president and someone took a picture of the event, creating a real-life Where’s Waldo…

…that nice Mr. Doctorow has some pretty good advice for writers…

…there’s this photographer named Michael Kenna that, somehow, has found a window into my dreams…

…people are starting to notice this Andrew Bird fellow and I say it’s long overdue…

…I’ve discovered that reading agent and publisher blogs like this one is akin to looking up your medical symptoms online. It’s always fatal…

…and, yes, I have heard that Batman is dead. I’m not buying it. This kind of foolishness is one of the reasons why I typically avoid mainstream comics these days.

So, I’ve done movies and songs and poems and books and even dreams. But the scariest thing of all..?

This was years ago.

It was summer. My family had gone on an extended trip to visit grandparents on the West Coast and I was alone in the house for six weeks.

I spent most of my time rattling around the house. The cats followed me around, as though they were trying to find where I’d hidden the bodies.

I stayed up too late, reading and writing. I played the radio too loud to fill the silence. Other times, I’d go quiet and not see anyone or say anything for days.

Over time, I found out that I was well suited for it, the solitude. Too much so. I started to avoid going out for any reason. Even getting up for work was difficult. I was spending so much time in my own head that anything which intruded or pulled me out of it became an irritant, something to avoid.

In some ways, it was nice.

Mostly though, it was just sad and lonely.

One night, I had a dream. It was the most complete narrative I think I’ve ever had in a dream, literally telling a story all the way from beginning to end. It was a very personal dream — meaning, I was the main “character” and it all happened from my perspective. But it wasn’t me, I was someone else.

I was a soldier and I was wounded. Afterwards, the whole dream became my short story Summer Salt. If you’ve read the story, you know how it ends. The horror of that last moment jolted me awake.

I lay there in bed, still half-paralyzed by the lingering fear from my dream. I rolled over and reached out, taking my wife’s hand.

“I just had a terrible dream,” I said.

Five, perhaps, ten seconds passed.

She lay there, silently holding my hand.

I could feel her there next to me, awake and strangely watchful like she was holding her breath.

I was not dreaming. I was not asleep, I know. The shock of my dream had driven all sleep from me.

Five seconds, maybe ten before I remembered.

My family was on the other side of the country, I was alone in the house.

But someone was holding my hand.

Then I was up on the other side of the room and the light was on.

I was alone.

I spent the rest of the night on the porch, lost in my thoughts, until the sun finally rose.

As I said, it was a long time ago.

So, let’s talk about dreams. Not to state the obvious, but they’re remarkable constructs, intricate and maddeningly detailed narratives that we manage to generate out of a sleeping mind.

Even more so, nightmares.

Something deep in our minds wants to scare us. But it’s wrong perhaps to ascribe motive or desire. Perhaps it’s better to say that something deep within our mind needs to scare us.

Fear, apparently, has it’s place… even in our dreams.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s interesting to speculate on whether that capacity represents a vestigial trait that we are on our way to shedding — or is it the first layer of something new in our evolution, a glimpse of something we might one day become?

I’ve been keeping a semi-regular, semi-faithful journal for a number of years now. Apart from my own internal whining, it has served chiefly as a place to write down my dreams — whether they are little, half-remembered shreds or full length narratives. A lot of the time, I cannibalize the creations of my sleeping mind in my writing.

Sometimes it’s just an episode or an image that gets worked into something. Other times, the dream is the spark that sets something alight in my waking mind. Matters of Mortology started as a dream. And my poem “The Queen of Middle Night” (available in this chapbook, shameless plug) is nothing more than a stack of snapshots from my dreams and nightmares.

Like everyone else, my dreams are deeply persona and they run the gamut: I’ve had murder dreams, flying dreams, erotic dreams, apocalyptic dreams, and even prophetic dreams.

(The answer to your next question is “Yes” — but that’s not our topic for today.)

Once, while I was telling a friend about a dream I’d had, he stopped me and said “Your normal everyday dreams are like my worst nightmares.” I took it as a compliment.

But it’s rare for my dreams to scare me — even at their worst, their darkest.

About fifteen years ago, though, I had one of those sit-bolt-upright-in-bed kind of dreams. In it, I encountered one or two of my biggest fears. Yet it wasn’t a scary dream. It was one where you wake up with a gasp, sobbing uncontrollably.

Scariest dream I know of isn’t one of mine. It’s one I heard my father tell my mother, years ago, and it is a very clear memory. We were driving along in the car — that old blue Buick of ours —- and the windows were down. I was in the backseat and I don’t even know if they knew (or cared) that I was listening.

But, as you can tell, it made an impression on me.

The funny thing is, I asked my father about it a few years ago and he doesn’t remember it — neither the dream nor the telling.

Dreams are personal things, so I won’t go into his telling of it here. But I can share a monologue from one of my plays, one in which I shamelessly cannibalize his dream for my own:

I am in the old house, where we lived back before my parents split up. I’m standing in the doorway of the back bedroom, the one where guests would sleep when they came to stay. But no one has come to stay for a long, long time.

The air in the room is warm and musty and thick. Outside, the sun is going down. Tiny particles of dust roam in the shaft of yellow light that spills in through the grimy window.

Against the wall, half-hidden in the shadows, is an old chest of drawers.

The top drawer is open.

A mirror hangs on the wall above it, grimy and filmed with dust. The top drawer is open.

I wipe the dust away from the smooth surface of the mirror. My reflection, my face, hollow and pale, stares back at me.

The top drawer is open.

I look in and there’s, there’s something in there, I don’t know what. Something I shouldn’t have seen. I slam the drawer shut and turn to leave the room, suddenly afraid.

Halfway to the door, the dull sound of wood rasping behind me freezes me in place. I turn around.

The top drawer is open.

I go back and push it closed again.

I step away and, and, the drawer, it . . . it slowly slides out again.

I push it closed, I lean against it, trying to hold it closed. But I can feel something inside pushing back. It’s stronger than I am, my feet are slipping on the floor, I can’t hold it in any longer.

I step back, halfway turn to run and stop when, one by one, all of the drawers slowly slide open.

Like “The Bogeyman” story I mentioned yesterday, my dad’s dream stayed with me for a very long time. In fact, it’s still quite strong in my mind. Any time I pass a drawer that’s not quite closed, I can’t help but push it shut.

And, each time I do, I step back and wait a moment… half expecting something inside will slowly push it open once again.