Spoiler alert: the following reveals details about various parts of the story that may detract from your reading enjoyment if you know them ahead of time.

Now that we’ve come to the end of my fantasy journey TIME BEING, I can tell you some secrets, including how it took form and where it led me in my own private journey.

The most common question I get asked as a writer is, “Where do your ideas come from?” That question has a million answers—depending on the story, on the genre, and even on the time of day. The easy answer is that they come from everywhere. All around us are stories just waiting to be written.

The postman delivers the mail. He’s late today. Did he miss the bus? Have trouble at home? Stop on the way to murder someone?

The neighbor’s cat who usually sits in the window has been absent lately. Did he move to a different window or has something happened to him? Did his person give him away? Lose him? Is he a really shape shifter who has taken the form of the apartment dweller himself?

A more complex answer to the origin of ideas is that they are small miracles sent to the writer from God.

Whichever you believe, writing Time Being was an exercise in pure seat-of-the-pants storytelling, and where it led was a journey, not just for the reader but for this author as well.

The scenes in the story were often based on my recurring dreams, many of which revolve around my childhood and family home. The house, from attic to basement is real. Aron is not. Brie is a combination of cats, endowed as a guide with the fantastical nature I needed her to be. Aron’s “old wound” comes from Arthurian legend. The “Work” came from inside me where I suppose I feel to some extent I have work that is never done.

My father was never aloof like Sylvan’s, nor was my mother weak, but the scene with her grandfather’s tragic death is a snippet from a dream I’ve had so many times I’ve wondered if it is a memory.

The Avenue, the Patch, and the tiled terrace were pure imagination, though the following quote came to mind:

“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”  —Rosalynn Carter

Originally, I wrote this story to be published on the now-defunct Kindle Vella. When I decided to put it on my blog, I ran into something totally unexpected. You see, I have a dark streak in me, and every once in a while, it comes out. The final third of the story took Sylvan to a very dismal place indeed, horrific, ingenious, and totally inappropriate for my blog readers. I needed to come up with a new ending.

That turned out to be the greatest inspiration I could have hoped for. Again I took to my reoccurring dreams. The dry riverbed that floods as I watch is a dream I’ve had since I was a child. It was a real place, a cabin on a small Washington river where I spent many summers with my grandmother and mother. The river would flood in the winter, coming nearly to the cabin itself, then drain to a babbling brook in the summer, though the changes were nothing so dramatic as I wrote in the story.

My grandmother loved it on the river, so when I dreamed about asking her forgiveness, it was natural to find her in that place. In my dream, however, I was asking forgiveness for something entirely different than what I wrote about. It was a revelation to me that my real underlying sin was ignoring her in those terrible, final years.

The carnival on the shore is another dream. The reconciliation with Zak is not. That was more of a wish. My son is not estranged, and we see each other regularly, but maybe, like many parents, I wish we would talk more.

I don’t know when I decided that the demons from earlier in the story would morph into demons of my own psyche, but I suppose it was a natural progression. As Sylvan comes away from her experience, she brings the one thing we all search for—hope.

Finally, I want to thank Unsplash and its many talented photographers whose work I used to create my collages:

Photo By Elizabeth

Mikhail Pushkarev

Uros Petrovic

Roman Skrypnyk

Lucasvphotos

Eleni Petrounakou

Ilana Amchi

Cor Gerber

James Craig

Tim Cooper

Bernd Dittrich

Simeon Birkenstock

Artem Kovalev

Juliana Marx

K.T. Francis

Annie Spratt

Laura Matthews

Donald Merrill

Photogon (Warren Valentine)

Bruce Tang

Thank you for reading TIME BEING. You can now read the story in its entirety here.