THE CURTAINS WERE PINK. HE WAS HAVING THE dream again.
Originally, I began the book with what is now the second section: “One Tuesday, in 1874, Reverend Moses Harvey woke up cold…” I grew to feel that it felt too easy to begin that way, with the simple and expected revealing of day, time, and main character. It felt, I suppose, too “grounding” from the get-go (and the book, as it progresses, I think, plays with an oscillation between feeling grounded and up-in-the-air, grounded and up-in-the air—a stylistic choice that kind of mimics the ways in which we’ve regarded the giant squid over time—as myth, as real, as myth, as real, as both at once…). I wrote what is now the opening section well after I had finished the first draft. I wanted Moses Harvey not just to wake up on a Tuesday in 1874, but to wake up from something. Likewise, I wanted the reader to feel grounded in the second section only after first feeling a bit untethered, unanchored in specific time or place, floating in a dreamscape. Do you have recurring dreams that somehow relate to your waking obsessions? Has a dream ever impacted your life (as it did Harvey’s)? If so, how so?
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