Dream a Little Dream... Or a Big One

Do you have a "dream"?
Do you even know what that is or what it means?
Is it a dream or a fantasy?
Yeah, I want to make a difference between those things.

But first:

I've been doing this a while, now, the whole author thing and, with it, the blog thing. I've changed the way I blog since way back in the beginning when I used a lot of my time to go and search out other blogs and be very interactive in the whole blogging process. It's time consuming, and I got to a point where I had to ask the question about what my dream was: Was it to write or was it to blog? But that's beside the point, though worth noting. The short of that was that I changed the way I blog, and I no longer go out searching for new blogs by other authors to get involved with.

The point of me telling you that is that I want to note how few blogs show up in my blog feed each day, now. Back when I was being heavily involved in blogging, there would be dozens of blog posts in my feed each day. It was seriously difficult to keep up with. When I changed the way I blogged, I didn't stop following people (even if I did stop visiting all of them), so all of those posts still showed up in my feed each day. Now, though, today, there were only two new posts in my feed. Monday, the heaviest day of the week, there were only eight, and there were none from Saturday and Sunday. [All of these numbers are as I write this on Tuesday, August 16.] Days without posts used to never happen. Never.

Sure, some of the missing people moved onto other platforms (InstaTwitter or whatever), but many of them just gave up on writing. Probably most of them. Okay, actually very certainly most of them. If I go down my list of people who no longer blog, most of them no longer do anything. They just quit.

And that is because of the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

For our purposes, we're going to call a "dream" something you yourself can accomplish.
We're going to call a "fantasy" something that happens to you.

So you can have a dream of buying lottery tickets, but any thoughts of winning the lottery are fantasies. Winning the lottery is not something you can achieve; it can only happen to you. Likewise, you can have a dream of being a writer (because you can sit down and do that), but you can only have a fantasy about being a rich and famous writer. You can be the best writer in the world and never become rich and famous because, as with the lottery, that is mostly luck. Maybe completely.

The problem is that it's easy to subvert your dream with the fantasy. Those things can be easy to confuse. When you believe your dream is the fantasy, you can become disillusioned. I know of several writers who quit, just gave up on it, because, after publishing a couple of things, they didn't become household names. It was crushing to them, and they just quit writing. They had a fantasy of becoming rich and famous and allowed it to take the place  of their dream. That's a dangerous thing, allowing your fantasy to squash your dreams.

How do you deal with that kind of thing?

Well, the first way is to identify your dream and recognize the fantasy for what it is.

However, it is perfectly reasonable to have a dream of being "rich," but you need to identify that as your dream. Your actual dream. If that is your dream, you need to choose a path that enables you to work toward that as a dream and, let me just say, writing is a poor path to riches. Pun totally intended. You could even choose fame as a dream, I suppose, although fame is a very elusive thing, and you need to find avenues that lead to that more readily than writing. I would suggest giving Will Smith a call. Evidently, he followed a very specific plan to get to where he was in the 90s.

Now, I want to take all of this back a step farther: What is your real dream? I mean, writing is my dream, but there is a deeper dream, Let's call the dream the "deep magic," but there is a "deeper magic," the thing that supports the dream. That dream for me is the dream of leaving something behind. Something lasting. Something for my kids but also something that goes beyond just them and, in one way or another, everything I have done in my life has worked toward that.

Let me put it another way:

My grandfather was a great man. I'm going to go into why that is because 1. it would take too long and 2. it's unnecessary to what I'm going to say. He was a great man but, once I and the rest of his grandchildren are dead, there will be nothing left of him. Nothing beyond a notation in a genealogy file somewhere. And a birth certificate. Nothing that anyone will ever take note of in the future. Even the farm he poured his sweat into and the house he helped build are all gone now, burned to nothing in the wild fires that swept through East Texas a few years ago.

I don't know what kinds of dreams my grandfather had; he was more than a little laconic. But it makes me sad that he will be forgotten one day. I want to leave something behind, and my writing serves that dream.

It's not that I have a dream of being the Shakespeare of the age. Or, even, the Tolkien. Or, even, the Lewis. But I would be more than happy with being a MacDonald. See, you people don't even know who that is, do you? Here, I'll help: George MacDonald. See, it doesn't matter how unheard of he is for the most part, because his books are still out there and he still influences people. Probably in more ways than we can even imagine.

So, yeah, I choose the dream of writing to fulfill the dream of leaving something behind that lasts. And, well, if fame and riches follow, well, that's a nice fantasy, but it has nothing to do with my dream.

So what is your dream? Is it small or is it big? And can you separate it from fantasy?




"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.

Why We Need To Go To Space

As a society, we've given up on space travel. It's not really a part of our cultural consciousness anymore. Not the way it used to be. First, there was the drive to reach the moon, and, once achieved, there was this innate belief that we had only just started. We had, for all intents and purposes, reached the "final frontier."

But, then, we abandoned it. Like, standing on the brink, we shied away. We couldn't take that leap.

Not that I think it's that simple, but, really, it kind of is. The money people looked, and wouldn't make that leap of faith that going out into space would be worth it. At least, it wouldn't be worth it to them, and screw the future, if you know what I mean. But it was that kind of thinking in the 80's (and 90's), the "what are you doing for me now?" thinking, that brought us to where we are. Which is not exactly the best place to be.

My childhood was full of visions and fantasies about what it would be like in space, and there was this expectation among all of us my age that it was going to happen. Not if. When.

Maybe it was the Challenger explosion that caused the change. Or, at least, started the change. At any rate, it's not something that we dream about culturally anymore.

And it's really too bad, because I think we're in sore need of that dream.

It's kind of obvious from a practical standpoint why we're in need of greater space exploration. Just the resources we could get from mining asteroids would be tremendous. Rather than go into all of this, you can just go check out Planetary Resources for all the details.
As an investment, just a simple monetary investment, space is looking really good.

However, I don't think this is where we would find our greatest reward.

For millennia, man explored the world. Man dreamed about the world. Man dreamed about the places he hadn't been. It did something for his spirit. Something unquantifiable. But, then, not all that long ago, we reached the end of the world. There's nowhere left to go. Nowhere to dream about. Not even the oceans or the air for all practical purposes. Not even under the Earth. That unquantifiable thing, that thing that used to inspire men to go and explore, is gone.

There is nowhere to go.

It's hard to say what we've lost as a society because of this, because we don't know which people would be the ones to grow restless and take off into the distance to discover now places. New worlds. Maybe it is that some, at least, of the current societal unrest is due to the fact that people that used to be the ones that would go explore can no longer do that. They have wanderlust that can't be fulfilled.

Like my cat when he wants to go outside.

I think we have people like this. Stuck in cities and wanting to get out, clawing at the door, meowing, but no one will let them go. Because there isn't anywhere to go.

Have you ever been stuck inside with a cat that wants to go out? It's much worse, in general, than being stuck inside with a dog. Dogs can (usually) be distracted, not so with cats. Just like with the cat, these people that want "out" need a place to go.
Space is that place...

Can you imagine what it would be like to have people taking off into space just for the sake of going? [Let me just say that I am not one of those people that would be going, but I think it would be so cool for those that would.] The kinds of things we would learn.
The kinds of dreams that would be born.

Which brings me to the other thing we've lost: dreams.

Once upon a time, man wrote about the dreams he had of the places he'd never been. Africa. India. The American Frontier. Under the oceans and up in the sky. Even space. But we've quit writing about those places, because we know what's there. Well, except for space, but, like I said, we've mostly given up on that. And we think we know what's there. Even though we haven't been there, we look through our magic glasses and decide all we need to do is look. Or send a tiny robot.

But I wonder...

I wonder what would happen if we actually decided to go. Like when we decided to go to the moon. The dreams that decision awoke in us. What would happen if we did that again? What kinds of things would we write about the things that we would dream?

That, those dreams, and those things people wrote about those dreams, that would be our greatest reward.
Because, when it comes down to it, it's the things that can't be quantified that we live for.

The Dream vs The World

I didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist. I saw my very first dinosaur sometime around the age of three, and I was instantly captivated. It was on a gas station of all places. I'm not sure if it was meant to be ironic or not. It's hard to know those kinds of things at three. My mother has told me, though, that I was hooked from that moment on. Everything was dinosaurs. In many ways, I learned to read by reading about dinosaurs.

In first grade, our teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up and, then, went around the room letting everyone answer that question. All of the usual answers came up. Fireman. Policeman. Doctor. Someone may have even said scientist. I know all of the other answers were normal because the teacher would nod and go on to the next person. Until she got to me. I said paleontologist. She told me I was making that up. We had an argument. She said if it was a real thing, then, I should I write it on the chalkboard. I'm sure she thought that there was no way I could spell a word that long even if it was a made up word. But I put the word on  the chalkboard spelled correctly. I won the argument.

All of my science fair projects while I was in elementary school dealt with dinosaurs in some capacity or another. Well, except for that one year where they actually told me I couldn't do dinosaurs again, so I did my project on the solar system. Generally speaking, I knew more about dinosaurs than anyone else at any school I was ever in, including the teachers.

Typically, kids' ideas about what they want to be when they grow up change quite a bit. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think most kids change their minds a couple of times a year before adolescence, meaning that the typical kid has had anywhere from 6 to 12 things s/he has firmly wanted to be as a grown up by the time s/he hits middle school. I only ever wanted to be one thing: a paleontologist.

Ironically, it was middle school that changed that for me. Two things happened: Earth science and Careers class. In Earth science there was a unit about rocks. I  hated it. Absolutely hated it. And the test on rocks at the end of the unit? The test where we had a bucket of rocks on the table, and we had to name them. No, not things like Bob and George. We had to identify them. That was my only non-A grade all year. I'm not talking about just in that class, I'm talking about all year. All of my classes. Everything except the rock unit. I hated rocks. And, thus, my Dream came face-to-face with the reality of the World and the World won. Between that and a project I had to do in Careers class about the profession I wanted to go into, I realized that no matter how much I loved dinosaurs, I would never enjoy being a paleontologist.

I first dreamed of being a writer sometime in high school. It had to do with Shakespeare, whom I didn't like, at the time, but that's another story. You can blame it on Romeo and Juliet. At any rate, I remember thinking about how cool it would be to write something that people were still reading, even studying, hundreds of years after I was dead. I mean, really, how cool is that? That was the dream... to write something that people would be still be reading and enjoying, maybe even learning about in school, after I was dead.

At some point, there was a new dream. Wouldn't it be cool to walk into a book store and see a book that I wrote sitting there on the shelf. I mean, how cool is that? Right? I'm sure we all have that dream. Just like I'm sure that, at some point, all guys dream/wish they were great poets. Usually, right around the time they fall in love for the first time. For most guys, though, that's just a brief phase. heh

So, here I am, 20 some odd years later, staring that dream in the face. Just like I had to stare that dream of paleontology in the face. Because dreams are great, essential, but, often, not realistic. Or, even worse, not what we really want.

When I was a kid, paleontology was not really my dream. Dinosaurs were my dream. I was like the kid  in Ray Bradbury's excellent short story, "Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?" Not that I actually wanted to be a dinosaur, like the boy in the story, but I thought I wanted something that I didn't really want.

After I finished my novel, I had this same sort of experience. I was grappling with the replacement dream, the dream of "wouldn't it be cool to walk into a book store, or, even, a Target or Wal-Mart, and see my book sitting there on  the shelf?" I think as writers, most of us start out with that dream somewhere in our heads. Possibly, that's the only dream we're having. The cool factor of being a name on a bookshelf. But I started delving into the data about the publishing industry to work out all of this how to get published stuff, and I didn't like what I was finding.

Now, I already knew about the huge amount of waste that publishing industry produces every year in conjunction with book stores, because I worked in a used book store when I was in college, and the owner used to rant about people bringing coverless books to him. But that was just the tip of ice berg. And all of this is a topic for another post, so I'm not going to go into it, now. As I found things out, I would comment on them to my wife. In a, um, negative way. That way she takes as me complaining when, really, I'm just commenting. She knows in my mind there's difference, but it affects her the same either way. Anyway...

Don't tell her I said this, but my wife is a smart woman. At some point in there, she said to me, "Well, what is it you want? Do you want to be published [i.e. have my book in bookstores] or do you want people to read and enjoy your books?" That's really what it comes down to, in the end: does your dream, the dream that drives you, match up to what you really want? For me, the dream of "being published" was at odds with what I really and truly actually want, that other people will read and enjoy my books.

Yes, yes, I hear you. "But being published is the way that other people will get to read and enjoy my books!" Except that's not true. I'll concede the point that it used to be true, but, now, today, there are so many other options. And most books that go through traditional publishing (and when I say most, I mean almost all), never sell 5000 copies. At this point, we could get into the huge debate over traditional publishing vs, well, whatever else, but that's also not the point. I will say, though, that, I think, we often defend traditional publishing not because it deserves defending but because we're defending our dream of being on a bookshelf in a book store.

I had to look at that dream and evaluate it. Is that what I really wanted? To be published and be able to walk into a store and point and say, "that's my book!" That would be so cool! I get it. It would be. But is it what I really wanted. No, it's not. What I really want is for people to have the chance to read and enjoy my book. On top of that, I don't want to support an industry I feel is wrong in so many ways. My Dream came up against the reality of the World, and the World won. Again. But it's okay, because that dream... it's not what I really wanted, anyway.

It's great to have dreams. We should have dreams. We need them. They fuel us. They give us goals. They keep us striving to achieve. However, we shouldn't just cling to dreams because they're our dreams. We need to evaluate those dreams on a fairly consistent basis so that we know if they are worthy of still being our dreams. Do they match up with what we really want? Do they align with reality? Which is not to say that, even, having impossible dreams is not okay. Some great things have been accomplished due to the "impossible" dreams of some people. But it's a pretty horrible thing to achieve a dream, to get there, and find out that, although you reached your dream, it wasn't what you wanted.

Here's what it boils down to: I see so many blogs from people striving, reaching, investing everything in the dream of being published, but I have to wonder if that's really what all these people really want. If it is, that's great. But when confronted with the question, and looking at it honestly and objectively, I couldn't say that that is what I really wanted. And, if it's  not what I really want, why pursue it so single-mindedly? I'll admit, that dream of being published still worms its way around in my head causing conflict, so I have to, pretty constantly, remind myself about what I really want. Make my work available for people to read and enjoy and do my best to let them know it's out there. After all, it's the same work I'd have to do even with traditional publishing. Maybe I'm the only one that this is true for.

This whole thing about evaluating our dreams isn't just for writers; everyone should remember to do this. I need to remember to do this more often. Is the dream we're pursuing, whether it's growing up to be a T-Rex or having a book published, actually the dream that we want? With all the changes in the publishing industry, right now, though, I think this is an even more important question for writers to be asking themselves. What is it you want from your writing? Does your dream of being published actually fulfill what you want?