Making-Of

Even though every writing guide strongly advises against it, I am tackling a different genre in this episode. Whereas the previous episodes were more like crime thrillers, this time it is not about catching a thief or unmasking a murderer. Instead, we are dealing with a film diva who is bitter about not being invited by the great Trampera.

The Plot

Miray and Dian find themselves in the role of siblings this time. Their mother, Amanda Brown, is a Hollywood celebrity. And she is furious. The famous Johnny Trampera is celebrating the completion of his new luxury villa in Malibu, and Amanda is not invited.

She tasks her two children with securing an invitation. But that won’t be their only task. A third stroke on the tattoo reveals that there is a third dream traveller. If they want to make it through the adventure, they have to find this third person.

The Setting

A film diva – what could be more fitting than choosing modern-day San Francisco as the setting for the episode? Amanda Brown lives with her two children in a villa in Los Angeles.

Trampera, on the other hand, naturally had his pompous luxury villa built in no lesser place than Malibu, specifically on the (fictional) Pacific Crest Drive.

The adventure offers everything that makes a spontaneous trip to the USA: sunny weather, refreshing pools, beach cafés, and drives in a classic convertible.

The Characters

Dian and Miray are siblings in this world. To their surprise, they even find evidence of this in the form of photos from their childhood.

New is the third dream traveller Felisha, called “Lish” for short. She is the opposite of Miray: acts impulsively before thinking about the consequences. Naturally, this creates tension between the two women. This constellation elegantly allows me to pass the Bechdel test. 😊

I also had fun developing the roles of the life-frustrated café owner Alfred (inspired by Al Bundy) and the incorruptible majordomo Hopkins (naturally an homage to the unique Jonathan Quayle Higgins).

And Johnny Trampera, the eponymous hero? Well, he is a MacGuffin, as is proper for a Hollywood story. Besides: Trampera… Travolta… You understand? 😂

The Dream World

For the dream worlds, this episode brought several major realisations.

Firstly: Lish. Miray was initially alone until she met Dian in Tear of the Desert. In this episode, a third dream traveller joins in.

Secondly: The childhood pictures of Dian and Miray, which actually shouldn’t exist at all, since both didn’t have a shared childhood. Their alter egos from the dream worlds thus seem to possess a past of their own.

Thirdly: Once the adventure is solved, you cannot linger in the dream world indefinitely. Whoever falls asleep there wakes up back at home.

But probably the most important (and for Dian, the most bitter) realisation is that he cannot meet Miray in his own world. She seems to be nothing more than a figment of his dreams.

Or he of hers?

What have I learnt?

Actually, not too much new about the craft of writing.

This episode served more to further consolidate my new writing style, which I developed in Deceptive Appearances.

In this short story, nothing is as it first seems. Is the Count of the Dark Castle really a vampire who has killed poor Mariana? Is Florica really the nice waitress, or does she have a dark secret? Is Miray really unfazed by everything, or does she have a weakness?

In this story, I’m playing with expectations and clichés. But it also serves another purpose: it develops the overarching story arc. We get to know a new side of Miray and experience the two characters growing closer together.

The Plot

Miray and Dian find themselves in a small village, somewhere in deepest Romania. A Count’s letter brought them to this desolate place. A young woman from the village has disappeared, and the Count now fears the worst for himself and his castle.

While searching for the woman, our adventurers get to know the people in the village better, as well as each other.

The Setting

It probably goes without saying that the film The Fearless Vampire Killers by Roman Polanski was the inspiration for this episode. The story told is, of course, completely different, but the atmosphere of the village tavern, the deeply snow-covered landscape and the Count’s castle all found their inspiration in this film.

However, one scene has been haunting my mind since I started the project: it is the scene in which Dian steps out of the stuffy and overheated taproom into the cold hallway to check on Miray. Where I would include this scene, and what reason Dian might have, only became clear to me when I wrote this episode.

I think the intense, threatening atmosphere, which begins when Miray asks about the Dark Castle and culminates in the visit to this castle, turned out particularly well. I am proud of the result, even if a professional author would certainly have got more out of it.

The Characters

Dian and Miray are described in this dream journey as “capable investigators”, without this being elaborated on.

Facing them are three irreconcilable parties: the landlord Alexandru with his family and Florica as an employee, the blacksmith Constantin, and finally the Count with his loyal servant.

With the Count, the name allusion to a contemporary person is quite obvious. The name of his servant found a similar inspiration, but I won’t reveal any more than that. 😉

The Dream World

There are no new insights into the mechanics of the dream worlds in this episode.

What have I learnt?

At first it looked like the usual routine that had set in in the meantime. I had written the episode through, proofread it multiple times, refined it. It was about to be published; I had even announced it.

Then I read the book “Deutsch für junge Profis” [German for Young Professionals] by Wolf Schneider. His tips on good writing style and sentence structure were a real eye-opener. Where previously I only sensed that “something wasn’t right” with a sentence, I now recognised where the problem lay and how I could improve it. ¹

As a result, I completely overhauled the entire story once again. I improved the sentence structure, expanded the scene transitions and made sure to describe the characters’ actions better. This extensive change cost me two months. But it brought the story from 8,000 to over 10,000 words, which also read much more fluently. I think the result was worth the effort – and the wait.

While I was writing the following episodes, I noticed that my writing style was undergoing a major change. On the one hand, this unsettled me, because I suddenly had to rethink a lot of things that I had previously jotted down and considered good. It felt like a step backwards on the way to finding and sharpening my personal writing style.

On the other hand, there is nothing bad about steps backwards if you take a better path forward afterwards.

Do you believe in ghosts and spirits?

In our real world, we usually don’t. But what about in a dream world, which is inherently irrational?

In the episode “Élodie’s Curse”, Miray and Dian get to the bottom of this question.

The Plot

In this dream journey, Miray visits her aunt and uncle in a French country house. Dian is with her.

The cosy visit ends abruptly when a ghost appears by the lake during dinner. The haunting continues into the night with a loud rumbling that shakes the building to its foundations.

Are ghosts at work? Dian and Miray go searching and soon find a hot trail which puts them in mortal danger.

The Setting

This episode crystallised out of a single scene that I had in mind from the start: an old house, it’s night time, a thunderstorm is raging, and inside a haunting begins.

As a setting, I chose a country house somewhere in France in the early summer of 1936. The house shows its eventful history right from the beginning. It has an unusual tower, a large clock on the roof and strange rooms.

The Characters

Naturally, Dian and Miray are there. This time, as they discover to their own surprise, as an engaged couple. It shows that in the dream worlds, they involuntarily slip into a backstory they themselves do not know. They are forced to improvise.

I hid a small Easter egg in the names of the three housemaids: Agnès, Denise and Paule. Anyone interested in home computers from the late 1980s will know them. They are the French name variants of the three custom chips in the Commodore Amiga.

The Dream World

Dian learns an essential trait about the mechanics of the dream worlds in this episode. He notices a burn mark on Miray’s upper arm. This stems from a burn Miray sustained in a previous dream journey.

From this, Dian concludes that injuries sustained in the dream world are permanent. And fatal injuries? Well, they might actually be fatal.

What have I learnt?

The origin of this episode was – as mentioned – a short scene. The difficulty lay in crafting an exciting plot around this scene.

I needed several attempts, going from a counterfeit money press in the cellar, to a romantic tragedy in a boarding school, to the story that is now published.

What I learnt from this: It is easier (for me) if I think about the plot first.

Revision

I also completely revised this episode to adapt it to the writing style I acquired during the third episode.

However, there were quite a few other changes in version 2.

New scenes brought Dian and Miray closer together. In this episode, it is clearly visible that the two protagonists harmonise perfectly with each other. But also that Miray immediately blocks any thought of a relationship that goes beyond a friendship of convenience.

I also completely reworked the showdown. It leaves Laurent alive and gives Uncle Henri a better chance to get out of the affair.

Therefore, I also like to refer to the current version as the Director’s Cut.

As the saying goes: you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

The first episode of a series is always something special. The main characters are unfamiliar, as is the story. Everything has to come together first. To make matters more difficult, the first pages must already hook the reader. Otherwise, the book quickly ends up with the other tsundoku, possibly forever.

With the episode “Tear of the Desert”, I made my debut as an amateur author. A short crime novel of about 8,300 words. What you can’t see in the story is over two years of preparatory work that I had already put into the overall concept of Infinisomnia, character development, polishing the writing style, and the overarching plot.

This first episode also offered a unique opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

But first things first…

The Plot

Car mechanic Dian falls asleep on the sofa at home after an exhausting day, and wakes up in the cubicle of a train toilet. He doesn’t know how he got there or why everyone is suddenly calling him Lacombe. In a compartment, he meets Miray, a traveller who is also trapped in this bizarre dream.

They find out that there is a thief on the train who is fleeing with a stolen diamond. No one knows what he looks like. Suspicion quickly falls on a fellow passenger. But is he really the thief they are looking for, or does the mysterious Miray merely want to deflect suspicion from herself?

The Setting

The episode is set on the Orient Express in March 1909. Originally, I planned a completely different location for Dian and Miray’s first meeting; the Orient Express only played a supporting role. But I liked the setting so much that I dedicated the entire first episode to it. It already shows the full potential of dream travel to different eras and places, which will accompany us in the coming episodes.

Besides, what could better symbolise the first journey than that famous luxury train?

The Protagonists

For this project, I took a classic as a model, namely the Sherlock Holmes short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They are about arguably the most famous fictional detective Holmes and his loyal companion and chronicler, Dr Watson.

I find the division brilliant. Watson serves as the narrator of their shared adventures; the stories are (with a few exceptions) written from his own perspective. Watson is no genius, nowhere near as much as Holmes, but he is friendly, open, and reliable – a character the reader can easily identify with. Holmes is the central figure of the novels, yet he always remains somewhat mysterious, closed-off, and stubborn.

I borrowed this constellation, modernised it, and spiced it up with a bit of humour and romance.

Dian takes on the role of Dr Watson. He is the narrator, a sympathetic, self-deprecating, occasionally somewhat naive young man. He provides a good figure for identification.

Miray corresponds to Holmes. She is smart, persistent, cheeky, but also closed-off and mysterious.

In contrast to the Holmes stories, which can basically be read in any order, the image of Miray will evolve. The all-too-perfect façade from the first episode will soon get its first cracks.

And the special feature I mentioned at the beginning?

In this first episode, not only the reader but also Dian meets his future companion for the first time. An ideal time to sow seeds of doubt: is Miray really the heroine hunting the thief alongside Dian? Or is she merely using Dian to deflect suspicion from herself?

The Dream World

In this episode, Dian learns the basic mechanics of travelling to the dream worlds. He reaches them in his sleep. They feel like a dream, yet completely real.

And waking up? That only happens once an adventure has been completed and a green circle appears on the wrist.

What have I learnt?

Hmm… what did I learn in the first short novel that I actually published?

I would say I learnt to narrate an entire short novel from beginning to end.

Linguistically, I actually thought it was quite good at first. Then I read numerous writing guides and wrote two more episodes before realising in hindsight that a good novel needs more than stringing together pleasant-sounding and grammatically correct sentences.

The first episode is now available in a completely revised “Version 2”. The writing style already fits better with the later episodes. I also improved various scenes, for example, the one where Miray and Dian break out of the compartment. In the original draft, Dian pretended to faint and Miray called for help. But this trick is so old that probably even a conducteur from 1909 would have seen right through it. The new trick is more creative and lets Dian shine in his capacity as a mechanic.

Afterwards, I treated this new version to professional editing. The truly excellent feedback is sitting on my hard drive waiting to be incorporated. Then there will even be a third version of this first episode.

I was surprised that many readers consider Dian to be the central hero of the story. After all, this constellation worked for Holmes and Watson too; one doesn’t talk about “Dr Watson and the detective”, but about “Holmes and his chronicler”. I finally found the explanation for this in a writing guide: readers automatically consider the first person in the novel to be the hero or heroine.

Well, beginner’s mistake. 😂