I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 3
by Karen Wiesner
"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason." ~Katrina Mayer
As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In the course of the next several posts, I'll be going over how these these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me.
This is the third of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles.
Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series
** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts.
Don’t close your eyes… **
RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR, Book 4 {sequel to THE BLOODMOON CURSE, Book 2}
** Back into the mouth of hell… Daniel and Hannah are newly married with their first child on the way when Hannah is bequeathed Bloodmoon Manor. After a lifetime of poverty, the wealth associated with that house appeals to her despite that she’d barely escaped it last time with her life. Daniel’s worst fears are justified. They’ve been lured here deliberately, and the horrors that haunt the manor aren’t willing to let Hannah leave ever again… **
Late into the night, I was revising THE BLOODMOON COVE for reissue as Book 2 of my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series, and I had some pretty disturbing dreams. When I woke up, I knew I had to write the story of the secondary characters, Hannah and Daniel, from that book. The sequel, RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR, was born. I always adore stories where the characters are trapped in a location that lends itself to horror and fright.
Reviews and Honors for RETURN TO BLOODMOON MANOR:
5 star review from Linda's Reviews
5 star review from Huntress Reviews
5 star review from Readers Favorite
5 star review from author Barbara Raffin
REUNITED, Book 5
** Twyla has spent the last three years suffering under the hands of her husband Dominic. His death gives her a new lease on life: Freedom and the chance to fall in love with her old friend Gray, now the Erie County sheriff. But her happiness isn't meant to be. Dominic's vengeful ghost followed her home and he's determined to reunite them in death and the afterlife so she never again forgets who she belongs to… **
The idea of having an abused wife whose husband comes back from the dead to haunt her came to me first. After kicking the idea around inside my head for a few days, I got a lightbulb about how to blend this into the Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series. In Book 1 of the series, BOUND SPIRITS, the hero John Kotter has a cousin he hung out with in Bloodmoon Park (which belonged to his family). Then I wondered who would best help his cousin Twyla deal with her vengeful, dead husband. I’d already written a sheriff into BOUND SPIRITS and I decided to develop Graham "Gray" Mecham into the hero of this book. When I wrote the first draft, all these things were in place, setting up for REUNITED.
When it came time to write, the story took a turn for the very
disturbing, but it works in this story so well. The dark content involved an aspect of life I hope to
never be truly familiar with. Honestly, while researching and outlining this
book, I didn't want to do too much research. I only did what was absolutely
necessary and those few items didn't take me to places I could never erase from
my own mind. This is my only book that actually has a
content warning on it: Contains
mature content that may not be suitable for sensitive audiences.
Reviews and Honors for REUNITED:
5 star review from Linda's Reviews
5 star review from Readers Favorite
4 star review from Huntress Reviews
HIDDEN, Book 6
** What you don't know can hurt you…
Sybilla marries her much older entrepreneur partner Tobias. Their publishing house produces a book series focused on unusual homes. After suffering memory loss about his past, Tobias inherits an isolated estate at the top of a mountain. Uncovering its mysteries becomes their next project.
The voice of a ghost urges, Find me, leading Syl to hidden rooms and the skeletons of a family desperate to escape its demons… **
HIDDEN is based on a scary dream I had over and over in the course of years, since I was a teenager. Kind of like the Vermeer's painting within a painting, in my dream the heroine has a recurring nightmare over the course of years about moving into a house where there are hidden rooms in which horrors have taken place. In this case, the house she's moving into is Howling Halls, which has been mentioned a few times in previous books in the series. It's one of the only two estates built on Bloodmoon Mountain. (The other was Bloodmoon Manor, featured in Books 1 and 4.)
In the dreams I'd had myself, we were moving into a brand new house, and as I'm unpacking, I realize that the house has so many more rooms than I remembered from when we were touring it in anticipation of buying the house. There's also a terrifying feeling of something evil in some of the new rooms. I also had some dreams about a ghostly child throwing temper tantrums and her grandmother trying to soothe her that I incorporated into this book.
I admit I was wary about writing this story. It’s the first one that I scared the crap out of myself while outlining it. I barely got any sleep those two weeks. It’s a horror, so it makes sense, but when I told my son this, he wanted to document how often horror writers actually scare themselves, lol. I figure, how can you scare anyone else if you can’t scare yourself? But in truth everyone has different levels of what scares them.
Review for HIDDEN:
5 star review from Linda's Reviews
Have you ever a recurring dream? Leave a comment to tell me about it!
Find out more about Bloodmoon
Cove Spirits Series here:
https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP
Happy reading!
Karen Wiesner is an award-winning,
multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:
https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/
http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor
https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner
http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/
http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/
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