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The way in which our brain generates ideas is one thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, although I think animals are capable of having ideas, too. My dog, for example, relies for most of his behaviour on inbuilt urges and impulses that we call instincts. Chasing cats and squirrels, for example, is a behaviour that’s pretty much hard-wired into him. It’s not a life choice that he’s made, after careful consideration of the options available to him. That is not to say that he doesn’t sometimes have what we might classify as ‘ideas’, however. On occasion, he will get up, go and find his squeaky toy and bring it to me. He sets it down at my feet, looks up at me, and in a kind of imaginary speech bubble I see the words, ‘Go on. Play with me,’ form there.
I think a clearer division exists in terms of imagination. I don’t think my dog is much given to imaginative flights of fancy. I do not think he dreams of worlds of his own invention where he may sprout wings and chase those squirrels right up into the trees. It would doubtless be interesting to question him on this, if only it were possible!
The writer is constantly faced with the necessity (or perhaps the compulsion) of conjuring into existence purely notional worlds that have no existence in fact. Sometimes these worlds may approximate closely to our general lived experience, and sometimes they might be utterly fantastic places populated by dragons and unicorns. In either case, the writer is setting up a stage, on which the characters they create can act out their dramas. Telling stories is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. The earliest one I know of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates back as far as the 3rd millennium BCE, but we may surmise that passing on stories through oral tradition is as old as humanity itself. The strange world of dreams is often a starting point for such stories. We are reminded of the visionary dreams of Joseph in Egypt, that predicted the woes that would beset that country in the Old Testament and of the role that ‘God-given’ visions have had in influencing the course of history.
There is, in my opinion, a particular ‘sweet spot’ that exists between sleeping and waking. I am no scientist, but I have read that there are different stages of sleep, in which the brain is either very active or in a deeply dormant state, in which the body recovers from the day’s exertions, and the brain works to catalogue and interpret the experiences of that day. In the phase I mention, the brain is at its most creative. I can rarely remember my dreams, but sometimes when I am conscious of being in this state, I can turn my mind to resolving the issues I face in developing the plot lines of my stories. I may have spent hours during the day in worrying about how to extricate one of my characters from the predicament I have placed them in, but when I am close to waking, or close to going to sleep, the answer comes unbidden to the threshold of my mind. The challenge then is to capture it, to lure it closer until a different part of the mind can set it down and make a permanent record of it before it is too late. It is like wildlife photography. That rare and exotic bird is there, tantalisingly close, and I must creep up upon it, slowly, carefully, with my camera, so that it may not be startled, fly up and be lost to me forever. There is a tension between sleeping and waking at those times. Part of my mind urges me to shut down this tiresome and energy intensive imaginative activity and drop into deep sleep. Another part, insists that I swim up to the surface of wakefulness, take a deep breath and get it written down before it’s too late. I usually keep a pen and pad of paper at my bedside for exactly this purpose.
‘How do you even think of this stuff?’ my wife sometimes asks me, and the truth is that, like most things, practice makes perfect. Daydreams as well as night dreams are the realms from which ideas emerge. My teachers would tell you that I was a very prolific daydreamer. All those long hours gazing out of the classroom windows during lessons, whilst the teacher’s voice became a barely perceptible background drone, were hours well spent in the perfection of my craft, if less conducive to understanding of Physics, Mathematics and French etc. There too, I might tread the fertile plains that lie between waking and sleeping, and ‘see what dreams might come’, to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Alex Trueman has just turned fifteen. He’s a typical teenager, a bit spotty, a bit nerdy and he’s not exactly popular at school, not being one of the ‘cool’ kids. His tendency to day-dream doesn’t exactly help him to be cool. either! But being cool isn’t as good as the talent Alex discovers he has – stopping time.
Yes that’s right. Stopping time!
Well, for everyone except Alex, that is, who finds that whilst everyone else is caught in a moment in time, he is able to carry on as normal. Maybe not quite ‘normal’, after all, he’s able to stop time, and whilst that’s not exactly as good as a certain ‘boy wizard’, it’s pretty close!
The only trouble is that reality for Alex isn’t always what is seems, and being plunged into an alternative can be a bit tricky, not to mention the fact that he makes an enemy almost as soon as he arrives, which tends to cause a problem.Will Alex Trueman, nerdy daydreamer, be able to return to reality or will he be stuck forever in his alternative? Is a moment in time enough for Alex to discover the superhero he needs is probably himself?
A Moment in Time is the debut novel of author Martin Dukes, and is the first in a series of Alex Trueman Chronicles, which take the reader, along with Alex, into a bedazzling world of time travel, alternative reality and flying sea creatures. His further adventures include the past, possibly the future and definitely a fight to save reality itself.
Enjoy an Excerpt
Alex returned home to find a most unwelcome development, which had arrived through the letterbox in the superficially innocent form of a brown envelope. It might as well have been a letter bomb for its explosive impact on Alex’s day. It contained his school report. His mother’s set jaw and the glint of steel in her eyes when Alex walked into the kitchen signalled danger ahead. Alarm bells were dinning away insistently by the time the brown envelope was brandished in his face.
“This,” she said, tapping him on the head with it for emphasis, “Is your report.” She paused to let Alex dwell on this prospect. “It does not make good reading. Let me see,” she pondered as she snatched up her glasses and whipped the report out to read. “Mathematics… 3C… English… 2C… Design Technology, get this… 4D.” She read through the whole list in a voice trembling with outrage. “And here’s the grand finale,” she said, shaking the page. “The considered opinion of your form teacher. Do you want to hear what Mr Burbage has to say about you?”
Alex had absolutely no desire to hear this now, or indeed ever, but he recognised there was no point in saying so. A display of submissive behaviour seemed in order. He hung his head. “Alex is undoubtedly an intelligent pupil with a bright future, should he choose to exert himself,” she read. “Get that? Should he choose to exert himself.”
Her face came worryingly close to Alex’s as she stressed this last part. He was conscious of a little drop of her saliva on his chin, at first warm, now suddenly cold.
About the Author: I’ve always been a writer. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion, and I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. Lots of childish scribbles in notebooks, lots of rejection slips from publishers and agents testify to a craft long in the making. In addition, it has proved necessary to earn a living by other means whilst those vital skills mature. For thirty-eight years I taught Art and Graphic Design, thirty-seven of them in a wonderful independent girls’ school in Birmingham, UK. For much of the latter part of this career I was Head of Department, which gave me the opportunity to place my own stamp on Art education there, sharing with the pupils there my own love of Art and the History of Art. Over a decade I was able to lead annual visits to Florence, Venice and Rome (some of my favourite places on the planet) as destinations on my Renaissance Tour. These visits created memories that I shall cherish for the rest of my life.
I love history in general, reading history as much as I read fiction. I have a particular interest in the ancient world but I am also fascinated with medieval times and with European history in general. This interest informs my own writing to the extent that human relationships and motivations are a constant throughout the millennia, and there is scarcely a story that could be conceived of that has not already played itself out in some historical context. There is much to learn from observing and understanding such things, much that can be usefully applied to my own work.
Teaching tends to be a rather time-consuming activity. Since retiring, I have been able to devote much more of my time to writing, and being taken on by the brilliant Jane Murray of Provoco Publishing has meant that I am finally able to bring my work to the reading public’s attention. I like to think that my ideas are original and that they do not readily fall into existing tropes and categories.
I am not a particularly physical being. I was always terrible at sport and have rather poor physical coordination (as though my body were organised by a committee rather than a single guiding intelligence!). I tend to treat my body as a conveyance for my head, which is where I really dwell. My writing typically derives from dreams. There is a sweet spot between sleeping and waking which is where my ideas originate. I always develop my stories there. When I am writing it feels as though the content of my dreams becomes real through the agency of my fingers on the keyboard. I love the English language, the rich majesty of its vocabulary and its rhythmic possibilities. My arrival at this stage could hardly be describes as precocious. However, at the age of sixty-two, I feel that I have arrived at a place where I can create work of value that others may appreciate and enjoy.
A 17 year old girl is overwhelmed with responsibilities trying to keep her messy family together. Everything spins out of control when her addict actor dad who bailed on the family three years ago leaving her with her lovable but bi-polar mom and her two little sisters, comes back into town and wants to reconnect.
Annie Wood is an Israeli-American, Hollywood native, and a lifelong actress and writer. The web series she created, wrote and stars in, Karma’s a Bitch, was Best of the Web on Virgin America (anniewood.com/Karma)
When her aunt suffers a stroke, New York portrait artist Emory Austen returns home to the North Carolina mountains to mend fences and deal with the guilt over her husband’s senseless death. But that won’t be as easy as she hoped.
Rebecca lives with her husband and a dog named Wilbur in the beautiful, misty mountains of East Tennessee, where the people are charming, soulful, and just a little bit crazy. She’s been everything from a tax collector to a stay-at-home-mom to an award winning professional actor and director. She loves to travel the world (pre-pandemic) because it makes coming home so sweet. Her Southern roots and the affectionate appreciation she has for the rural towns she lives near inspire the settings and characters she writes about. 
The world of Alda is broken, destroyed by an event the survivors call “The Rupture.” The aldyrs, magical trees connected to the soul of the world and once grew in breathtaking groves, are dead. Elf-kind, who shared a close bond with these trees, are dying off due to shortened life-spans as a result. The dwarves have retreated into their mountain homes. Humans gather in crumbling settlements. Sinister, god-like beings, each uniquely horrific, exert their influences over the world. Each story is a different thread forming a larger tapestry that shows the scope of the horror and insanity brought by the elusive and mind-numbing entity known as the Obscured Throne. The world was once saved from this threat and Alda was hidden and sealed away. Now, an ancient and shadowy cult called the Black Gnarl have broken enough seals to expose Alda to the Obscured Throne…and It’s coming.
Fantasy and horror have always been Russell’s preferred genres. Some of his favorite stories often combine them–and the grittier the better. His eclectic tastes in this genre originated when he discovered Lovecraft’s stories of beings so vast and incomprehensible that just thinking about them will melt your brain. Later, he would discover the more sinister but equally unfathomable creations of Laird Barron and, combined, these two influences would create Russell’s desire to fashion his own story of cosmic horrors, but with a fantasy flair. Fantasy often holds many horrific aspects of its own, but Russell enjoys finding ways to take those facets and run with them.
Can the Brits and Yanks team up to solve a murder?
M. K. Scott is the husband and wife writing team behind the cozy mystery series, The Painted Lady Inn Mysteries, The Talking Dog Detective Agency, The Way Over the Hill Gang, and Cupid’s Catering Company. 
Scarred pasts haunt bright futures.
This book is inspired by true events.
Tabitha Biel Luak is a South Sudanese-Canadian author. Tabitha was born in South Sudan, Africa. She relocated to Edmonton, Canada in 2011. Tabitha is a mother of two beautiful girls. She is currently taking her bachelor degree in Psychology. She is very passionate about helping her community grow. She is involved with youth in helping them reconnect to their roots by learning about where they come from. Tabitha is a gospel singer who also writes and sings songs about social issues. 
When divorced mother of two, Carole Kelley, moves herself and her children to Dickens, she figures the most difficult thing she’ll have to face is providing a perfect Christmas for her 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.
NANCY FRASER is an Amazon Top 100 and Award-Winning author who can’t seem to decide which sweet romance genre suits her best. So, she writes them all.
