image from Stencil
My life for the last month or so has revolved around editing. It has taken me back through paranomrals, mostly written after 2014, but one in the 1990s. They all involve earth beings with spirit beings.
In an afterward to one of the books, Diablo Canyon, I wrote about its inspiration. I will also have that in my main blog, only written more recently. The following was written over ten years ago. It is how the book came into being, along with the three novellas that it encompasses.
~~~~~
Dreams sometimes come to authors and on occasion, they even lead to stories. I’ve never had one such as led to When Fates Conspire.
In the fall of 2013, a young cat I loved very much had something catastrophically wrong. After many tests, realizing she was suffering, we had the veterinarian come to our home and mercifully put her to sleep.
That night, before I went to sleep, I asked for a dream about life, about reincarnation. I wanted to believe she would return to me. I had felt her spirit had before through various cats I had owned.
That night, I had a dream where I vividly saw a story of reincarnation with some of the images described in the book, When Fates Conspire. I watched the spirit guides as they declared what had happened and was to happen. The dream that came to me was not about my cat exactly, but it was about the survival of the soul, about meaning to life—and about mystery.
In the morning, I knew I had to write it down. As I did, I saw that with some expansion, it could be made into a novella. I began to think about these characters, who could they be. It took some filling out, but I kept true to the bones as that dream had come as a gift. I was not about to distort its message. The characters as they appeared in the first novella were expanded as they had to be but their essence, and even some of the dialogue, was not changed.
There is more to life than we see. What seems meaningless is not. We are not alone. Reincarnation happens. Soul mates have a very unique connection that isn’t always easy and can even sometimes get in the way.
Is any of that
true? I don’t know. I just know what the message was in the dream. I still
remember how that ring of gold looked when the couple kissed.
It was only after I had the first novella written that I realized there was more to this story. The second story, The Dark Side of the Moon, was partly because I saw the agony for the mother, who had suffered such losses. How does a woman heal from such losses? What happened to her?
Myra was obviously an interesting woman, strong and worthy of an unusual and strong hero.
Her story is where the ranch life south of Billings took on a life of its own. Living on a ranch myself, I knew a lot about the work of such a world although it’s far more expansive on big operations like the Box Z. The story stayed true to that life with a little supernatural magic mixed in. The spirit guides were still there and the hero had his own unusual gift. When that novella was finished, a question remained.
Was there more to that canyon? Are there places of power, spiritual power for good or evil? I do believe in such places—although maybe not quite as intensely powerful as Diablo Canyon.
To write the third novella, Storm in the Canyon, I researched Native American gods, demons and spirits. They would be the first to sense and seek out such a place, but there would be others, humans, who would also desire to harness that power for their own purposes.
Native American gods may or may not be real, but there are many similar stories as to their powers, their desires. The needed research was not only informative but gave me the third novella with a different hero and an unexpected heroine (because that is the longest of the couples' stories, they will be on the cover next... after my editor is through going over and then formatting it..
Diablo Canyon was not written in the usual way for my books. It is, however, as it unfolded from winter into the summer of 2014.
Incidentally, I found another cat and love her. She was six months old when my cat died; so, she’s not the one who had come as Fluffy, Persia and then Pepper. She is still with us.
Despite that, I watch for the possibility that the other will return to me. The pain of her loss has never fully left. I only hope that if she doesn’t come back to me, she has found someone, who will love her as I did and do.
Some losses just never go away even if we someday see the purpose behind them.
