Dream­ing Awake had its roots at the begin­ning of my love for role­play­ing, in a free-form online RP forum that I hosted in around 1998. Such pop­u­lar­ity that it had faded after a year or so, and it trans­formed into a col­lab­o­ra­tive fic­tion project dubbed “The Fan­fic,” though it had pre­cious lit­tle to do with fanfiction.

My role in that enter­prise was the col­la­tion of the story — tak­ing each contributor’s sub­mit­ted story frag­ments and com­bin­ing them into one coher­ent whole. A job, need­less to say, that I was mon­u­men­tally bad at.

Hav­ing aban­doned the project due to a lack of the vast reserves of free time that the Fan­fic seemed to require, I was left with a pile of char­ac­ters and frag­ments of an idea but very lit­tle to stitch them together.

Hav­ing failed at pro­duc­ing a work of fic­tion, I turned to con­sid­er­ing mak­ing a game. The left-over Fan­fic ideas coa­lesced into a plot for a game that was to be called “Dragon’s Claw”. Once I had deter­mined to cre­ate a game, how­ever, my inher­ent ten­dency to geek out took over. Before I had any­thing like a sen­si­ble story pro­gres­sion worked out, I had char­ac­ter lists and item lists and a magic sys­tem and a world map and… every­thing but the impor­tant bit. The sto­ry­line lan­guished, accu­mu­lat­ing lay­ers of cheesy dia­logue as the time passed.

After a while, my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with what the story had become and my fail­ings at pro­duc­ing some­thing that was enjoy­able to play took their toll, and I aban­doned the project.

A few years later, dur­ing the Autumn of 2002, I seemed to regain some cre­ative instinct, and an urge to write. At that time I was spend­ing two hours a day on trains, com­mut­ing to a new job much too far from home. Writ­ing seemed a log­i­cal thing to do with my new-found spare time, and so I began. I scrapped vir­tu­ally every­thing except for the faintest out­lines of the story (that there two par­al­lel worlds, the “real” one, and the “imag­i­nary” one), and started to write again, from the beginning.

Start­ing anew with only a vague idea of where things were going was a new lease of life for the Dream­ing Awake saga. And that’s where the project is now, slowly but surely being built from the ground up, as a book rather than a game.

The story has become a lot less corny and RPG-like, and turn­ing into a much darker and more psy­cho­log­i­cal one. Rather than the other world sim­ply being a Middle-Earth-ish and rather fea­ture­less land­scape, it has become some­thing quite spe­cial to me. The story is an adven­ture, but a rather dark one, and one which chal­lenges the reader’s assump­tions about what is real and what is not.

And that’s where it is at the moment. I sus­pect the story has at last come of age, and now sits in some­thing approx­i­mat­ing its final form. All that is required is the time, inspi­ra­tion and moti­va­tion to put pen to paper for the large swathes of Dream­ing Awake that still exist only in my head.