Author Thoughts Tangled Up In Dreams – 082625
As I began to pull thoughts together after only a single cup of Café Verona, one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs hit my mind’s ear – “Tangled Up in Blue.” That one will be toward the back of the rack, but once it’s in your head…sorry about that, but it’s good music.
Tangled up in dreams? Where do they come from, and more importantly, why? It’s not like I dream nightly of something significant, or for that matter, weekly. What does matter is whether it wakes me up enough to make notes on my phone and then send them to the printer in my office without lifting my head off the pillow. I call it dream research interruptus. I learned that writing down a description of a dream, or the seed of a dream, sometimes only a keyword or two, is my best practice, or it evaporates like the smoke in “Puye Prophecy” when an Indian spirit like Big Crow with Little Feet shows up.
Puye Prophecy came from a short story written years ago under the title “Puye Princess.” My Relentless Wench Muse, who manages to remain just out of reach, whispered as She’s done before, “There’s more story here, Mate!” And, as She usually is, She was correct and the novel spilled out of dreams of mine own and dreams of my main character, Katherine Jackson.
The connection to the word “Puye” was by a complete fluke, as I randomly paged through an ancient Rand McNally Road Atlas and dropped a finger blindly on a page halfway through, landing on northern New Mexico. Under my fingertip was the Puye Ruins. Strangely, I had been there and seen the ruins on a family trip in the first grade when we lived in Albuquerque, NM. Researching Puye, I thought it was the name of a Puebloan tribe, but I learned it was actually the Tewa language, which describes not a people, but a place where there is – “a gathering of rabbits,” also known as a hunting ground.
It’s funny how researching a single word – Puye – led me into researching threads to multiple places, like southern Colorado, where a massacre by the U.S. Army over an Indian village called Sand Creek in 1864. I wrote about a fictional event, but the scenario was very real. Ultimately, the ruins were not important, but the events that took place near the hunting ground on the mesa above the ruins were the ground zero for some truly bizarre occurrences that Katherine endured. In 1864, a roving patrol of blue legs came across a hunting party of three young braves and their female companions and murdered them all. Katherine was there in a dream and witnessed the whole event…and thanks to a spirit guide, she acquired the spirit of one of the women who was murdered – the fiancée of one of the men, heir to tribal leadership. From that loss, the prophecy began in 1864, so that their spirits would wander until they were reunited. Some spirits want to see them reunited and the prophecy fulfilled, while others do not, because Katherine was a spirit carrier, carrying the seed of an Indian baby boy in her womb. How she became pregnant was, as her sister, Maddie, referred to it as some freaky Indian voodoo.
“Wise entangles dreams, historical events, and the paranormal in his latest thrilling suspense story. Once again, drawing readers into his intriguing characters while leading us on a wild journey to understanding. Using ancestry, DNA, and an entirely relatable young Kat, we find ourselves immersed in the unexpected at play within. “Puye Prophecy” shows us an entirely new and enchanting side to Wise’s talents as we’re led on a thousand-mile journey, across centuries, in this smoky life awakening.”
I always get a rush when I read a review that appreciates the work and research that goes into a story. This excerpt from a recent review by Jill Rey Reviews shows what often influences my stories.
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Amazon Buy Link – bit.ly/44euZzV
Review by Jill Rey – https://bit.ly/4fPqa49
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Author Thoughts are posted on my Facebook Author Page, Learning by Living, and my Substack site.
Peace! G.