I started working on the novel tonight. Through my angst-fest of last night I got a lot off my chest and then my wife made me write tonight. I love you, baby! I didn’t write a real long time, but I got almost an hour down and got 1,446 words down on paper. I’m excited by that. It’s a beginning!
About half of what I wrote tonight was repurposing of stuff that I wrote back in 1999. I wrote a short story back then called “Morpheus Rising” that I had always thought might be a prologue for this novel idea if I ever got around to writing it. Well, I’ve gotten around to writing it, so I brought the old short story in to serve as the beginning as I had always intended. I did some editing and put some new stuff into the middle of it and left quite a bit of the ending out, but it helped me get a good start down on paper.
One last note–I changed the name of the book. It is now Morpheus Rising, in honor of the original short story. I think it fits the idea a lot better than The Lotus Eaters did.
I’m going to close this entry out with the two quotes that I put in as epigraphs. They really set the tone for the work, I think, and let you know where it’s heading. Keep coming back for updates as I really get going.
“…Morpheus became fascinated by the way a little corner of man’s mind remained awake in sleep…It seemed to him that these fantastic colored shadows the sleepers painted were the most beautiful, most puzzling things he had ever seen. And he wanted to know more about how they came to be.”
Bernard Evslin, The Adventures Of Ulysses
“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause…”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3 Scene I
