The Hidden Lands of Nod

The official plan for The Hidden Lands of Nod calls for two more novels following Sleeper Awakes. Next in the schedule will be book four, Rataxes, the General, to be followed by the fifth book, Another Noon. At the moment, these books exist primarily as outlines and sketches, although I have begun a first draft of Rataxes, the General. This book I expect to approach the length of Sleeper Awakes, as it drills down into the sphere of the great antagonist of Habdvarsha, the conquering swarm of trillions of identical generals each known as Rataxes. Where Sleeper Awakes covers a sprawling landscape, Rataxes, the General will probe, even now is probing, intimate, internal depths. This will be the only book in the series written preponderantly in the first person. It will consist of alternate entries from several sources: an officer’s official reports, a young woman’s diary, the letters of Bigger—a boy from Sleeper Awakes now grown into a young man—and commentaries, advice, and interruptions by various persons among the Dvarsh. Settings will alternate between the artificial command habitat of the Rataxian Horde and a planet laboring under their occupation, with one, possibly two, brief returns to Habdvarsha. Of course, I’m revealing first draft conditions here. Everything can and will change once I have a draft in hand and start revising.

Finishing out the planned series, Another Noon, the fifth book of The Hidden Lands of Nod will be a slimmer volume, probably of a size with Prelude to a Change of Mind. In this novel we shall encounter Bigger as a man past middle age, with a long and difficult history he doesn’t much care to talk about, faced with a classic line-in-the-sand decision. Imagine Gary Cooper directed by Sergio Leone to a script by Carlos Castañeda. Then mix in the Dvarsh.

Beyond the fifth book lie shadowy possibilities. I have one large outtake from Sleeper Awakes that is itself nearly book length. There are also tributary stories that may demand to be told. At some point I hope to collect all my Habdvarsha-inspired illustrations and graphic pieces between covers or on a website. A Dvarsh Wiki is taking little, tiny baby steps toward existence. Like the Nod’s Way oracle, like the planned grammar and lexicon of the Dvarsh language, these eventual future projects see light as companions pieces, rather than parts of the series proper. As Mathilde Rigidstick would insist, the distinction is crucial.

I had no plans to write Entranscing, the second book of The Hidden Lands of Nod, until pressed to do so first by my partner, Janel Nye, and then by my publisher and editor, Deltina Hay and Ric Williams. Sleeper Awakes has always assumed that a story like Entranscing had taken place, but without the specificity of an actual tale. Well, the power trio insisted on more story of Meg Christmas. It would have taken a stronger, braver man than this author to refuse. Of course, once the specifics were written in Entranscing, another revision of Sleeper Awakes was required in order to conform (or not) to the new detail.

From outline through fourth draft, I wrote Entranscing in thirteen weeks, then spent another seven creating the cover illustration. The plot structure consciously emulates those of serially published novels from the sci-fi pulp hey days of the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter has an arc and a hook, the first to up the stakes and the second to keep one reading. A book as much fun to write as it is to read, I’m mostly satisfied with the results—although it may contribute to an ultimately erroneous expectation that the other novels of The Hidden Lands of Nod will follow in the same tidy, sequential fashion as this did from book one. NOT!

Prelude to a Change of Mind was the first work to emerge from Sleeper Awakes. After I finished a first draft of the latter title, I was seized by an urge to tell the story of the main character’s mother. I mean “seized” in quite an actual way. For the first of what proved to be many times, I set Sleeper aside to focus on a derivative project.

I started Prelude to a Change of Mind six times from scratch. Each of the first five attempts I threw out so I would be unencumbered by those versions. The sixth attempt produced a manuscript worth revising. At that point, I tossed the first draft of Sleeper Awakes, wrote a new outline and began again at the beginning. For years I worked on the two novels in alternation, interspersing development of the oracle, Nod’s Way, and invention of the Dvarsh language. Finally, in 2000, I self-published an unfinished version of Prelude to a Change of Mind using the print on demand service, Xlibris. The main reason I did this was to get it out of the way while I turned attention fully onto Sleeper Awakes. Ironically, Sleeper had to take a backseat again when I undertook to finish Prelude to a Change of Mind for its February 2007 release by Dalton Publishing.

The story is that of Meg Christmas, found, as the book begins, sick unto death in a remote mountain camp. Beings out of legend arrive to save her, emerging from an alternate realm where they live in exile. Before the tale is told, it is Meg who must rise to save another. A quiet, intimate adventure, Prelude to a Change of Mind boasts dire peril and brave feats, but also lots of tea with Ekaterina Rigidstick, poems by Jack Plenty, and talks with both about the nature of reality and conditions of being. There is also a distinct erotic thread that simmers along until the exciting conclusion.

Ultimately, I can’t promise that Prelude to a Change of Mind really is the story of the mother of the main character of Sleeper Awakes. As the second novel in the series, Entranscing, makes clear, there are multiple inputs into that particular state of parentage. The most accurate description of the narrative relationship between the books is that Prelude is the story of one of the figures contributing to motherhood of Sleeper’s protagonist, but not necessarily the primary contributor. Although, she could be.