haiku dream book

I had the strangest thing happened – I started dreaming in haiku.

I know why, too. I’m almost done preparing my class lectures, and once I finish editing “Nightfighter“, I want to start a new book.

One of the ideas for this book involves a woman, a half-elven doctor, whose husband (a human historian) vanished without a trace. She assumes the secret police “disappeared” him, since they won’t give her a straight answer, and finally threaten her and her father if she doesn’t stop asking.

Five years later, she has extensive contacts with the black market. Her clinic is at the bottom of the rationing hierarchy, and she needs the black marketeers to get the medicines and food supplies her patients need. And while purchasing medicine, she finds her husband’s journal among some scavenged junk from a battlefield. It’s written in cipher, of course, in case the secret police ever found it, but he taught her the cipher before he disppeared.

In the journal are haikus, little poems about how much he loves his wife, and details about his historical research. And while most historical writing glorifies the triumph of the Revolution and the leaders of the Party (it’s now Year 209 of the Revolution), her husband’s research went way beyond the limits of what the government considers acceptable.

See, apparently he figured out that the head of the secret police is two thousand years old…

-JM