Guest Blog - Tyler Burks

Dream Suck

You're there, minding your own business, sleeping your way through the rough and tumble of life. A sleep that you earn, day in and day out, by paying the bills and making the decisions and choices you have to make to get through another day, to another sleep. 

All of a sudden you're there, in another time and place, chasing or being chased, laughing and loving, your heart racing like it never does in your 9-5, the adrenaline pumping through your veins and your heart and your brain. Just as it's getting good, a bolt of lightning shoots through you, and you're awake. 

Man, all you wanted was some damn shut eye. 

I feel like there's a moment when you really start to live. When the sleep and the job and the day to day and the surviving tries to become more. When the endless skyscapes and haunting terrors and wonderful adventures of our dreams need to touch on our waking lives. When enough really just isn't... enough. 

For me, the thing that got me started on my dreams was nothing more than a whim. I decided to write a fanfic, just for fun. It was a crossover of a video game I really liked and a tv show I really enjoyed and a cute idea that popped into my head and, being someone who consumes too much media, I thought... I could do something like that. 

So that happened and Grimm Hour was born, and 100,000 words later, it stopped being a dream and became something I was proud of.  https://www.fanfiction.net/story/story_edit_property.php?storyid=13062889

When I was younger, I never really considered myself an author. Everyone told me I should be one when I was little, because I knew how to put words together in a way that makes sense. I didn't think I had much of an imagination for it, or the discipline. I had a lot of excuses back then. 

Really the thing that inspired me to branch off from fanfiction and write my own novel was Samantha. If she had never written Healer in the Mist and showed me that it could be done, I might not ever have believed I could do it myself. Thanks hon, you're the best. 

It was in reading Healer that the break between dream and reality started. Right now it's just a small crack in the glass. I'm currently writing The Rune Mage's Apprentice, a Fantasy LBGTQ+ story about an extremely powerful - and potentially insane - gender nonbinary mage that decides one day that they're bored with just being the best, and they choose to take on an apprentice.

With every passage, every chapter, every page, and every edit that I make, that tiny crack in the veil gets bigger. Dream seeps a little bit more into reality. My 9-5, my responsibilities, the things I do to get through the day, they stopped being my waking hours. They became the hours that my mind and body are on standby, resting, waiting desperately to crack that veil just a little bit more. 

Dreams suck.

But sometimes, they suck you in. 

-Tyler Burks