I don’t often remember my dreams in great detail, but I woke up this morning with last night’s dream bouncing around in my head. I visited a guy who in my dream I knew to be Ernest Hemingway, even though he looked little like him at any point in his life. (In fact, I think he looked like a young Kasey Kasem.) I was young, and felt the need to contribute to the conversation, so I asked him when he moved to Chicago. He talked about how famous he was for suicide—that there had been many attempts. And then he showed me something on YouTube. He had taken a video of a bunch of surfers all riding a wave together and PhotoShopped (VideoShopped?) himself into the scene. “It’s gone viral,” he told me, with no small amount of pride.
So, it was only slightly surreal when I issued a Tweet about my dream this morning and a few minutes later I received a notice that Ernest Hemingway was now following me on Twitter.
I’ve known about this for a while but now that the table of contents has been announced I can say publicly that my story “The Boy in the White Sheet” will be in October Dreams II from Cemetery Dance. The story reveals what happened after the events of my first published story, “Harming Obsession.” I often wondered over the years what took place the day after the end of that tale, which is also my most-reprinted story, and I finally came up with a story. I’m in good company in the anthology: among the marquee contributors are: Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Robert Bloch, Stewart O’Nan, Joe R. Lansdale and Al Sarrantonio, along with some of my Necon friends, such as Elizabeth Massie, Matthew Costello, Kealan Patrick Burke, Sephera Giron, and many more. Looks like it will be a massive volume.
