Author's comments on TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER

Author's Comments

by Hugh Cook
         The background for this book was established back in the 1990s, when I wrote various drafts of fantasy novels set in the city state of Oolong Morblock.
         However, the present plot was formulated in 2005 and the text of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER was written fairly quickly during that year.
         I was living at home with my parents, and some of the writing time overlapped with cancer treatment. The rest of the book was written when I was recovering from the effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy - full story in

CANCER PATIENT
medical memoir
full text online

and essentially all I did was sleep, write and go out walking once a day to build my strength.
         My parents don't have television. They don't have an Internet connection, either. They have borrowing privileges at the local library, but for most of the time that I was writing TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER my eyesight was too poor for comfortable reading.
         During the final stages of writing this novel, I had cataract surgery on both eyes, with an intraocular lens being implanted in each eye to restore vision. I also had a vitrectomy (jelly-removal operation) on the right eye. (Earlier, I had already had a similar operation on the left eye.)
         The subtitle for TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER is A BOOK OF DEATH, and this book is, in large measure, a response to my confrontation with my own death.
         I actually started writing the book on 18 April 2005, and my notes for that day say:-

"Today I just checked the maps and set up the basic files. Plan now is to sleep, maybe get to work on a basic skeleton tomorrow. Main project at the moment is BAMBOO HORSES, but am ahead on that so may leave it until Monday."

At that time, I would have been still undergoing chemotherapy, with radiation therapy still ahead of me.
         So, when I started writing TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I was still working on BAMBOO HORSES, and the completion of my medical memoir CANCER PATIENT lay ahead of me. However, later, I focused in totally on TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER.
         The melieu map I already had. It began back in the 1990s as a hand-drawn map and then, early in the twenty-first century, I build a computerized version using a program called Dia, a program optimized for drawing electrical circuits, which I was running under Linux.
         By the time I settled down to write TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I was using Windows XP Professional, and had the melieu map available to me in a bunch of formats, including bitmap format.
         I hesitate to guess how many hours of work the map involved, but it could amount to hundreds, spread over a number of years.
         While the book was written quickly, it benefited from the fact that I had meditated on the background and on the key characters for a number of years. It also benefited from the fact that I was locked in to the task for weeks on end, seven days a week, essentially functioning as a writing machine.
         That's not a fun way to live, and, during the years in which I was working as a professional writer - a number of years back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was laboring on my CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series - I never worked such grueling hours.
         However, with no TV, with no Internet connection at home, with my ability to read library books marginal, with movies only accessible in an eyesight-damaged version, and with severe budgetary constraints keeping me close to home, I really had no option but to knuckle down and write.
         The big benefit of this intense application was that I was able to hold the complexities of the book in my mind in a way in which I have typically not been able to do for previous projects.
         For every previous project, there has been at least one stage at which I had complete mastery of the structure, and could see how it all worked together. However, for previous projects, typically this was a transitory phase, something I had to do in order to get all the parts working coherently, but which I only did briefly.
         In the case of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, however, my command of the book was much more intimate, and I was able to run the plot through my mind while riding on the ferry from Devonport across to Auckland, or while lying on the operating table for one hour, fully conscious, while a combined vitrectomy and cataract operation was performed on my right eye.
         The downside is that this is, quite simply, no way to live.
        Toward the end of December, I booked a ticket to return to Japan, where my wife and baby daughter were waiting for me. And, by the time I booked the ticket, for a flight scheduled to leave New Zealand late in January 2006, I was more than ready to return to what I have come to think of as "normal life".
         The upside was that, as the writing of the book progressed, I began to have a total writing experience. The writing of the book became automatic. I was immersed in it. Any time I stopped writing, new ideas would generate themselves automatically, the complexities of the book breeding fresh complexities.
         On one particular day I had the experience of possessing unlimited creative energy. I wrote and I wrote, and I was reminded of a day, many years ago, when I was trekking in the Nepal Himalaya, and had a kind of day-long peak experience, hiking through the highest of the high mountains, five hundred meter contour lines melting beneath my feet.
         That day, high on endorphins, I felt invincible. Possibility had no limits. I felt like a god. It was a day that justified the journey of my life up until that point.
         And, on one day during the writing of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I found, amidst the brutalities of my schedule, a similar kind of high, a sense of limitlessness.
         TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER did not end up being the longest novel I ever wrote. The longest is a massive quarter of a million words, all of which are online on a free to read basis:-

THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER

Even so, TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER ended up weighing in at a fairly substantial fighting mass, well over five hundred pages of novel.
        One of my original ideas, when I set out, back in the 1990s, to write a series set in the city state of Oolong Morblock, was to get away from the world of swords and dragons and write a book set firmly and squarely in a modern urban setting.
         My original inspiration was the big city environments which I had encountered on my travels through Asia: in particular, Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong. When I started out, these huge urban connurbations were new to me, and alien.
         One thing that I discoverd when I sat down to write TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, after spending seven years living and working in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, was that high density urban living had become totally familiar to me, and the megametropolis had become my natural domain.
         TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER is, then, amongst other things, a book of the city.