by Rik Johnston
INTRODUCTION
Dreaming god was born from a nightmare I once had. At the time that I had this nightmare, I was very interested in independent film, particularly films that told a very personal and small story. Sure, I’m a huge fan of special effects blockbuster films, but I wanted to make an independent film that was about broken relationships between people, and how those relationships were healed. I was inspired in 2002 by a film by M. Night Shyamalan called Unbreakable, which was about a guy who is a superhero, who doesn’t know he’s a superhero until he was the sole-survivor of an accident, and somebody makes him begin to question why he survived without a scratch. I bought the DVD and watched it hundreds of times because I was addicted to the way the story unfolded, and how it was such a personal tale. That was the kind of story I wanted to tell in my own independent film.
One night, I had this nightmare about a car accident, which is identical to the accident in chapter one of this book, except for the character of Tuesday herself. I awoke from that nightmare and felt compelled to write about it, and was up for hours creating the basis for the idea. And that’s where Dreaming god began. Over the next few weeks, I began to work on a story about a boy named Jason Braddock who would have nightmares about the future. But the story would need other characters to help propel Jason on his journey. At first, Jason was in a regular family, who was well off and his parents were influential in the community in which they lived. I had the idea about a therapist, and how he would interact with Jason.
None of that worked for me. When I decided that the character needed to have vulnerabilities, I switched Jason over to a new girl character I had, and decided that she needed to be a part of a broken family where her mother was a drug addict who slept with men for money. This gave a whole new level of depth to the story, and felt like it was the right way to go, and thus Tuesday Moxley was born.
The story you’re about to read is a very personal story for me, and has been through many years of refinements, and while the original nightmare is presented in its purest form, the story that surrounds it has grown beyond my wildest aspirations. This began as a screenplay for an independent film, which had to be shelved for a few years.
When I pulled it back off the shelf and read it, I realized that I had written an overlong script that was fat and very dialogue driven that would have clocked in at over three hours as a film. In 2005, I got serious about the screenplay and trimmed it down from 183 pages to a streamlined and healthier 132 pages, knocking nearly an hour off the final run time, had the film been made.
I began working with an artist named Jerry Clement, who drew some of the coolest drawings on the back of the news briefs that would sit at the table of our local coffee shop where my friends and I would hang out. Back in the day, he took those ideas and brought them to life in a way that inspired me. I began to think of ways to storyboard the script and started to create a shooting schedule for it, looking for places in the town of Longview (which was the basis for The Devil’s City) and Kelso (which was the basis for Cadence Falls) Washington to use as locations for the film. In fact, The Merc in Longview served as the inspiration for The Millwork Tavern. I even began to audition a few Tuesdays, and this young girl Megan Jones, absolutely blew me away in her ability to emote for the part at 12 years old. If Megan Jones ever reads this, she needs to know that if the project had gone forward, she was unequivocally my only choice for the role out of all the young girls I met.
Ultimately, the funding for the project fell through, and I was unable to make the independent film that I wanted to make, so Dreaming god got shelved for about five years. In 2009, I reformed a band that some friends and I had made called Cerebral Eulogy, and there was some talk about doing a concept album to set ourselves apart from what the other bands in the area were doing at the time. I pulled out Dreaming god and the band read it over and loved it, but after a few weeks of working on ideas for the project, it seemed to great of a task to accomplish with our limited means, and it was scrapped, back on the shelf again.
I’ve had all these ideas for stories in my head for years, so after the band folded again, I took a stab at turning it into a novel, which I had gotten about a hundred and twenty something pages into before my PC crashed and the file was corrupted beyond any hope of retrieval. I was too crushed to start from scratch again, so once again, it ended up on the shelf.
In 2012, I began talking with a guy online who said he knew a Hollywood producer who was looking for a good original story to turn into a film, and I told him about Dreaming god, and he thought it sounded interesting enough to pursue. He acted as a middle man and I sent story treatments and breakdowns of the thing, and would get notes back telling me to tweak this, or change that, and so I made a version of the screenplay that gave them what they were looking for, much of what ended up in the novel you’re about to read. Somewhere along the way, the producer found another project, and Dreaming god was shelved yet again.
Fast forward to 2013, I decided that I need to write a trilogy of science fiction books that have been pounding around in my head since I was a teenager called The Chronicles of John Alkali. I began putting story ideas together for that series, one night I had an epiphany that all the stories I would write would live in the same universe. I knew that Dreaming god was a novel I was going to write after The Chronicles of John Alkali, but quickly got bumped ahead as I began to work on it right from the screenplay. What’s been really fun since I made that connection, was understanding how the characters from one story relate to the other story, and I can’t wait for you to discover this for yourself.
Now that Dreaming god is nearing completion, I am very proud of what I have accomplished in this journey. I’m emotionally attached to these characters, and the novel has forced me to flesh out details that the original screenplay never covered. This story is much greater now than I ever imagined that it could be, and I’m proud of the hours that I’ve spent on it. But more than that, I’m happy to finally release it, and share it with you. I hope that you enjoy what I have taken the time to create for you.
The next full-length novel I write will be the first in my science fiction trilogy called The Chronicles of John Alkali: The Key of Immortality. I hope to have the first novel in the trilogy completed by this time next year, in time to release by the new year in 2018. Thank you all for your support, and I can’t wait to share my future works with you.
Peace and prosperity.
Rik Johnston
Mobile Alabama
P R O L O G U E
SUMMER, 1980