(Fiction Special) - The Dream King's Daughter - Prologue

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Alsack-2014-09-14-Jb.jpegPhoto: Settlement of Alsask, on the Alberta, Saskatchewan border, taken by James Bow on September 14, 2014.

Prologue

"Your name is Aurora Kelso. Not Perrault. Kelso."

"Kelso," Aurora muttered.

"You have lived in Cooper's Corners all your life. You have no mother. You have no father. There is only Aunt Matron."

"Aunt Matron."

"Forget me."

"I... forget..."

A persistent light winked her slowly back to consciousness. Aurora snorted and fruitlessly tried to flick it away. She opened her eyes and shut them again at the sudden bright blindness. She raised her head and looked around, groggy. Her mouth was dry and tasted terrible.

She could barely take in what her eyes were telling her. They were on a black ribbon ploughing through a sea of yellow, the only car on the road. The horizon ahead of them was dark, but the clouds glowed like mountains.

Beside her, her mother hunched over the steering wheel, staring ahead with the glazed look that suggested extreme concentration in the face of a desperate need for caffeine.

This wasn't right, thought a small clear voice that was muffled in the addled confines of Aurora's brain. The sun peeking over the horizon behind me is sunrise. We've driven all night. We're still driving.

"Wh-where?" she croaked. She strained against her seat belt. Her joints ached from sleeping upright. "M-mom, wh-where--"

Her mom gave her a quick look. Her cheeks were wet, and she cleared her nose with a sniff. She adjusted the controls, and the side view mirror dipped, pulling the sun out of Aurora's eyes.

"Just rest, honey. J-Just go to sleep, and rest."

She placed a hand over Aurora's eyes...

And Aurora slept for three years.

Forward to Chapter One ->>


The novel that got away.

Back in late 2007, after I had published The Unwritten Girl and Fathom Five and was finishing The Young City for publication -- and after finishing the first draft of The Night Girl -- I hit upon a new story idea. One of the oldest documents featuring it has the following notes:

A daughter (Aurora), encountering something strangely mystical, doesn't realize how serious things are until her father takes her on a drive, and they drive all night and through the morning.

Daughter left to work as a waitress in a small town diner somewhere. Wakes up. Realizes she is in sort of witness protection program.

Who is she? Who is her father? What are they running from?

Some things have changed in the years since, as you see from the prologue above, but over the next year and a half, this proved to be a fun story to pursue. I spent a lot of time working on The Dream King's Daughter (grabbing time while Wayfinder and Eleanor played at the Early Years Centre). A part of me revelled in the free-for-all that dreams offered -- ignoring the truth that, in surreal fantasy, you have to work twice as hard to keep your readers engaged and believing in the world since you are taking the rules of the world and throwing them out the window. I was more naive back then.

Still, I was pleased with the result, and The Dream King's Daughter became my fifth completed novel, sitting in reserve while I tried to get The Night Girl published. Both took a back seat to my science fiction novel Icarus Down, which Scholastic Canada purchased and published in 2016. And while The Night Girl underwent a thorough rewrite, turning it into a New Adult urban fantasy that was not Scholastic's cup of tea, Scholastic did accept The Dream King's Daughter as my second novel with them. I even signed a contract and announced it back in March 2018.

Sadly, it was not to be. Staff shakeups at Scholastic Canada, as well as the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in the book's cancellation. (Don't worry; I got to keep the advance Scholastic sent me.) I had no choice but to set the novel aside while I worked on publishing The Night Girl and finishing the manuscript that would become The Sun Runners.

And that is where things stand today: a fully-written, 56,000 word novel sits unpublished on my hard drive. This happens more often than you'd think. I'm sure the library of unpublished novels would be one of the biggest in the world.

But why not try again? Why not find a publisher willing to take The Dream King's Daughter on? Well, I think The Dream King's Daughter is not my story anymore. I am a very different writer now than I was in 2007. Compare the stories of The Unwritten Books trilogy against Icarus Down and The Sun Runners, and you'll see. I've evolved. True, The Night Girl began life in 2003 and also hit some snags before being eventually published in 2019, but it underwent a from-the-ground-up rewrite that changed the narrative, the characters, and the plot, keeping the best from the old draft and making it much, much better, and very different from what it was before (case in point: the original draft was 64,000 words, while the new draft clocked in at over 90,000).

The Dream King's Daughter has not had the same opportunity, and while it would be tempting to give it the same treatment as The Night Girl, I have other stories to write (such as The Cloud Riders and The Curator of Forgotten Things). Right now, The Dream King's Daughter is more of a window into how I used to be as a writer.

Which might be a useful thing to show (not to mention providing a nice freebie to promote my other works).

So, for the next eleven weeks or so I will be taking and lightly editing The Dream King's Daughter and posting it for free to this blog and some other venues. I think you'll enjoy this wild take on thunderstorms made of crows, animated plastic bags, a young woman who can read people's dreams, and the dark forces desperately reaching out for her.

Either way, stay tuned!

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