Over at my video titled The Beginning of Terrapin I talk about how I got started writing about Terrapin and where that led me. Here, I'm hoping to dig a bit more into that memory vault before it becomes some dragon's hoard.

The title of the first manuscript, The E. of P. (The Enterer of Pictures), was from reading a book that suggested we live in pictures. Delighted by the idea, I imagined that it was possible to enter actual paintings and go just around the corner of the frame. I wondered what was the name of that place was. I wondered who lived there.

My imaginings of that place were like a pocket. I had done some prewriting called The Crow's Road that never got anywhere. But when it did get going, it was like a kind of world in a cave. I didn't have any clear definitions of where things ended. There was a forest that was called Trans Sylvan (the "through" + "forest" in Latin, via Transylvania via Stoker's Dracula). I had a book of quotations that I was sourcing, and I believe it was from here that I picked up the initial name of Dreamland from Poe's poem, perhaps in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft's title his own world of dreams. But I had grander intentions than a land of dreams. This was a land of the psyche. It was populated with archetypes and expressions of the mind. And it wasn't just my mind--it was everyone's.

While writing, I had the notion that there were friends in Dreamland. They were a kind of underground resistance of the psyche. The main character was a boy, Bartholomew, who was going on a perilous quest and these friends would help him. I imagined them as a bit like Robin Hood--hiding in the forest, wearing green cloaks, having bows and arrows. They wore realistic animal masks that may or may not have been their faces.

A lot has changed since those days, twenty five years ago, but a lot has remained: the friends in the forest, the world that has grown and changed, and the treasure of being there.