The ‘Dream’ That Started It All (Sprinkle of Information – Part 1)

In the spirit of the Festive Season, this month’s blog posts will sprinkle excerpts from books other than The Lion’s Den.

I mentioned in my bio that what prompted me to grab that pen and paper and start scribbling was a dream; so vivid, the scene just kept building inside my head long after I had woken up.

The dream itself was brief; nothing more than a snippet, much like a scene you stumble upon whilst channel surfing. Standing on the third step of the spiralling marble staircase, a guy was asking a girl loitering at the bottom of the stairs to a dance.

Purely from a visual point of view, there was nothing too extraordinary about the dream. But, just as being chased by a machete-wielding crazed man or a hungry lion could send your heart racing, I woke up knowing there was a sense of casualness in the way the guy asked the girl out and the fact that the girl was hanging around the luxurious-looking interior of the house in the first place (as though she was dropping by to pick him up on their way to a movie); a deep sense of familiarity born out of long-term association, if not years of deep and meaningful friendship.

With only this rough idea to prompt me, I started to flesh out more of the scene. Much as I wanted to keep the fixture (because, let’s face it… who wouldn’t want to have a spiralling marble staircase as a backdrop?), in the end, it was more important to highlight the ease in which these characters conversed with one another. By the time this event took place, geographically speaking, spiralling marble staircase in a semi-private setting was on the scarce side, and having the characters stand around one simply for the sake of having said fixture present would scream forced, if not downright impractical and irrational.

Appearing more than halfway through Tormented by Echoes and Ghosts (Book 3), Wouldn’t Be The Worst Thing was actually the first conceptualisation of Elizabeth (Lizzy) Hartley and Michael Bradford.