Happy Thanksgiving to my not-IRL friends! This is also a big anniversary for me. It was two years ago this November that I had the dream that led me to start to write my first book. It was a vivid dream, one I can still see in my head if I concentrate hard enough. I was back in school, and it was high school. But it wasn’t my high school. I was at the public high school in my hometown. Somehow or other, I had ended up back at public high school after a year at private school. I was in the cafeteria, and I had finished my lunch. I was dumping my trash in the garbage can, when suddenly a boy I had not seen since I was in junior high approached me and asked me if it hurt. When I inquired about what would be hurting, he answered with a crooked smile, “when you fell from heaven.” In my dream, that pickup line led to a whirlwind relationship, and I got flashes of the next two years and how wonderful it was. I was so happy that I had gone back to public school. The dream was heading for happily ever after, when suddenly, a voice over spoke. “But none of this ever happened,” it said in a flowery but professional female voice, “because someone was out sick that day and the two never met by the garbage cans.

I don’t know if any Star Trek fans read my blog, but if so, do you remember the classic Next Generation episode where Jean-Luc Picard gets zapped by an alien probe, and ends up living decades on a strange planet, including having a wife, children, and grandchildren, and even learning how to play the flute, until he was a very old man, and he was returned to his ship, only to find that only 25 minutes had passed? Yeah, that’s kind of how it felt for me when I woke up from this dream. It had seemed so real, so vivid, that I had to sit there for a minute and remind myself that I graduated from high school, and not a public one, 35 years earlier! I was a bit disoriented, and couldn’t stop thinking about the dream for days.

It wasn’t the content of the dream so much, but the feelings it brought. I felt like I had missed something. There have been several times over the years when I have wondered what my life would have been like if I had gone to public school. Who would I have been friends with? The same people from junior high, or some other people from other junior highs that all converged on the same high school? Would I have met some new boy in high school, and would we have hit it off? Maybe whoever he was, he was at a private school somewhere thinking the same thing as me, about what it would have been like if things had gone differently.

I could have let it go right there, but actually, I couldn’t. I was anxious. We had just started with the Omicron variant of COVID, and things were not looking up with the world at that moment. I was stuck at home, working a job that I felt I could perform better with in-person collaboration, especially with my ADHD. I was craving change, something different. My family was doing the best they could. My poor daughter was stuck doing on-line school, which was not the best plan for her, and my retired husband was trying to keep the house together and also respect my need for quiet and confidentiality while I worked. Poor guy. And there I was, sitting in my tiny little home office, which was more like a glorified closet with windows on the far side of our bedroom. With a desk and a bookshelf in there, there was barely room to push back my chair, and my bed was two feet away, reminding me every moment that I was not in the office, and I had just crawled out of the covers right there only hours before, and would return there later that night. I HATED working from home. And there was no end in sight.

I mentioned before that I had been knitting, and I ended up completing 42 hats. That’s a lot of hats. They were in piles on a table near the front door, and my husband kept asking me what I was going to do with them. They kept falling over. I had no idea what to do with them. But then, the dream. I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. The feelings. The not knowing. It was pushing at my brain. So one day, I decided to do something about it.

I started to write it down. I created some people. There was the girl, Sally, who had left her friends and gone to private school, to find her way, and see if it was a better fit for her than private school. Her parents had given her a choice, and she had decided. Then there was James. James was slightly troubled. He had difficulty with focus, and a brother with lots of problems. James represented the unknown to Sally. I had to give them a slight back story, so I did. They were acquainted in junior high, but he was a bad boy, and she was, uh, well, she hadn’t figured out what she was yet at the time. But somehow, she had some kind of connection with the bad boys.

And that’s where reality ended. When Sally meets James again in the hallway of McKinney High on the first day of school, every bit of that book becomes fiction. Sally and James set the stage and told me what needed to happen. Characters do that. They tell you about themselves, and when you put them together, they tell you what they are like together. You can write something else, but it won’t work. There is a chemistry, and if your characters have it, you have to go with it. You. Have. No. Choice. But I’m glad. Because Sally and James’s chemistry worked. It worked well for them, and for me. And the next thing you know, there’s a really long story about Sally and James. And my dream is satisfied.

The only problem, of course, is that once May I Have Your Attention Please was completed, Sally and James told me something else, something new, something unexpected. Their story was over, sort of, but there were lots of other stories to tell, and I already knew the characters. They were Sally and James’s friends, the ones that supported them, and helped them to make it all happen. They all had stories. And I had to tell them.

So I did. I wrote six more books in the series, each of them featuring supportive characters that were present in the hotel room on the night of junior prom. Junior prom. Something I didn’t go to, but Sally did. And it was the most wonderful time of her young life. I’m happy for Sally. And for James. They had it easy, and they found love.

As the series progresses, things are not so easy for all of the other characters. Kim and Carl have a tough time getting it together in Book 2, I Just Can’t Say I Love You. And some of the other characters don’t even end up with who they started with, as you will see in Book 3, coming in February. In Book 4, our female lead doesn’t even really have a high school boyfriend, and in Book 5, the female lead has more than one, but is not who we thought she was. Books 6 and 7 will surprise you, and if you’re anything like me, they’ll make you cry just a little.

I am now working on another series, which is in the same time period, but not featuring our McKinney High friends. They are there in some of the books as minor characters, but this series introduces you to new players, and new settings, including New York, Delaware, and Colorado (Eastboro is still in there, though. I love Eastboro). I’m on book 7 of 7 now, so I’m about to have to figure out what I’m doing next. I might leave the 1980s and Eastboro all together, and maybe try a completely different genre. Maybe add some magical touches. Only time, and my imagination, will tell.

Here again are the links to my Facebook page, Debby Meltzer Quick Author, TikTok, @dbmquick and Instagram, quickdebby_author. Please follow me on these pages. And please explore my page here at debbymeltzerquickauthor.com.

Enjoy your holiday that has nothing to do with turkeys, and make the most of being with your family, whether the one you were assigned at birth, or the one you have chosen for yourself.

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