Hello, friends.
I’m writing this on Sunday, the day after I usually try to put together the newsletter, because I fell asleep and took a long nap yesterday. It’s snowing as I write this, nothing terrible but the first significant snowfall of this season. Maybe of the year, where I am. Last winter had almost no snow. I’m not looking forward to this busy, stressful week at work even though I have a short week because of a doctor’s appointment booked a year ago. Bring on vacation!
Alas, there’s still close to a week-and-a-half left before vacation. Now the goal is to get through with my sanity.
Welcome to the 152nd installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and worlds of dreams and fantasy. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
Thank you.
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Most of the writing work that happened this week was on Project: Moons, with almost 1,200 words added. Between G’s basketball, exhaustion, and other appointments, not much else was done.
I was looking at some author’s websites to inform my own ideas for a re-design of billgauthier.com. I’ve had the same layout since I started on WordPress and really need to update it. Such is life.
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There is a pivotal scene in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger when an important character says, “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” If you’ve read the Dark Tower books, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I was 13 the first time I read those lines, lying in bed with the mass market paperback, and shocked by what was happening. The line lived on, though, throughout the rest of the books and in the minds of fans of Roland of Gilead and his ka-tet. I’ve been thinking about other worlds lately. Part of it is that I’ve been listening to the Dark Tower audiobooks for about a year now and am in the last volume, and part of it is because of my own writing and my own dreams.
When I was still a kid, I began to realize that my dreamscape consisted of a strange version of the area I grew up in. There was a place I went with my parents that I loved and one day asked them to go to get blank looks. I realized then that I’d dreamed of the place several times. My dreams still consist of some of those places, too, though some have closed, just like the real world. Of course, the places are usually stores that carry things I love. Comic books, books, action figures, and other collectibles. None of them are big but they’re places I’ve visited over time. Because the real world has a tendency to invade the fantasy world, time has not always been kind to some of the places and they’ve closed, just like the real world places I loved in my youth.
One of the features of my dreamscape world is that things are bigger than they are in real life. So the small city I grew up in has larger buildings and more things going on. The local mall is much larger and had better stores and a parking garage. I’ve met both Stephen King and Freddy Krueger at this dream mall, not on the same day. The school I work at is similar but different. Larger and brighter (or darker) but still the shitshow politics that marks public education.
This dreamscape world has informed my writing. Readers of my work, especially Echoes on the Pond, may remember the city of Harden, Massachusetts. It’s described as one of the three small cities that make up a triumvirate of cities in the Southcoast of Massachusetts; New Bedford and Fall River are the other two. Harden has the town of Clifford to its west and, over the Acushnet River, the town of Fairview. If you looked at a map of Massachusetts and looked into the armpit of the state, you’ll see New Bedford and Fall River, you’ll see the Acushnet River, but you will not see Harden or its surrounding towns.
Harden, Massachusetts, is my fictional city that’s based on New Bedford, where I grew up. In many descriptions of the city in my writing (much of it edited out for length), the fictional city is basically the dream version of my hometown. The towns of Clifford and Fairview are the fictionalized versions of the towns of Dartmouth and Fairhaven. The real places are also mentioned in the stories that take place in and around Harden but don’t often play big parts.
Many writers who grew up reading Stephen King have places they return to in their writing. Throw a stone in the air at a gathering of horror writers and it’ll land on someone who has had places and characters from one story pop up in another. I think it’s because when we were reading King in our formative years, it was fun to see places and characters mentioned in other works. Sometimes it’s sad (like learning the fate of Thad Beaumont after the end of The Dark Half) and sometimes not (Pennywise the Dancing Clown leaving a message in Dreamcatcher).
There’s a certain element of being home when writing about these places. My forthcoming novel, The Monster in the Closet, takes place in Harden and Clifford. The novel I’m currently revising that I call Project: Amusement Park and the one I’m writing a first draft of, Project: Moons, take place in these areas. I’ve had ideas regarding the mythos of these towns in my stories that could lead to other, bigger stories. Or not. That’s the fun of writing, it doesn’t need to go that big if I don’t want it to.
Another part of creating these worlds away from ours is because my generation had a lot of practice living in fictional worlds. When I was a kid, most of my time was spent playing with various action figures from various IPs that have informed my own storytelling. As a writer, I would love to write novels set in the Star Wars universe or some of the superhero worlds. I have a pretty cool idea for a Masters of the Universe story and a great sequel story to the Nightmare on Elm Street stories. This year I read an amazing anthology called The End of the World As We Know It, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene (two writers who have their own mythos throughout their work) that takes place in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. I would’ve loved to have contributed a story but loved that the anthology exists at all (and it’s good, too! Important). I suppose I could refit some of these stories to match my own worlds.
I am afraid of relying a little too much on my comfortable fictional places, but I also really enjoy being there. Since they’re based on the place I grew up and live, I feel like these settings are good ways for me to analyze the world that was, that is, and that could be.
In the end, these are places that have lived in my creative mind for decades and they are home, more so than the real places they’re based on. And that’s something, even if there are ghosts and monsters. The ghosts and monsters can’t be any worse than what we have to deal with in the real world. Can they?
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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