It began with my little sister presenting me with a manuscript. Handing over a large stack of paper, she explained that she’d written a novel and wanted me to read it and give my opinion. I agreed, but asked her to reciprocate: read my novel and give my opinion.
Gina’s manuscripts turned out to be a humorous mystery. I thought it had a lot of merit. That’s the feedback I gave her. Did she have feedback for me? No, she hadn’t read my ms. She started but then forgot.
Her answer frustrated me. I’d lived up to my end, etc. I was called away before we could finish the conversation. Gina and I agreed to meet later.
Going on somewhere else via dreamport, I was now in a hilly city. It had been rainy. I was standing on the corner by a street. A man in a dark suit and raincoat (who looked a lot like James Noble (the actor)) approached me. We knew one another and shook hands and talked. Within a few minutes, he was telling me that they’d just come out with word about who the new POTUS was going to be. He gave me a name. It as going to be announced soon.
The name surprised me. I knew the man’s name and so on, but didn’t know him. I expressed some concerns about him.
We started walking down the hill. He was concerned about the choice, too, and was wondering where the man was. He didn’t know if the man had heard yet. As we walked down the hill, the other man mentioned the name again, and then said, “Do you know who he is?”
I began talking about that when the other said, “No, he’s my father.”
That completely surprised me. We went through a conversation about their last names, which was something like LaFontaine. I said, “Pierre?” The other said with a smile, “No, that’s the NRA guy.”
As I was mulling that information, others arrived, and the conversation went on again about the new president. Then the new president drove up in a little old white imported economy car. While it ran without any problems, the car looked like it was forty years old, something small, with petite chrome bumpers, like a Datsun 510 (see the picture?) from the early seventies. (I’ve never owned or drove a 510, btw.)
The others all went off. I trudged back up the hill and, via dreamport, returned to my sister and the manuscripts. She’d read my manuscript and had some suggestions. As we began talking about that, a second younger sister, Sharon, arrived to give me her manuscript. I was surprised. We began talking, and as we did, I said, “I need to add more humor to my novel,” and was excited by immediate ideas that came to me about how to do that.
Then I awoke.
Michael Seidel, writer 