So I dreamed that I was going on vacation to visit family in rural Indiana. I have have had family girl Indiana. My boss sent work with me, in this case, he required me to take bottles of pills to count while I was gone. Though how that would work, I don’t know.
So I grabbed an armload of bottles to take with me and it turned out one of them had a controlled substance in it. When I went to count that one, something pulled me away before I could count it, and when I returned, the bottle was empty with only the little canisters of dessicant left.
I panicked and retraced my steps, wondering if I’d put the pills down somewhere without noticing, but it never turned up. Meanwhile, my cousin’s daughter became hostile to me, insisting that we weren’t even really related. At this point, I went through the family tree, attributing these cousins to my grandmother’s sister, even though we were mostly close to my grandmother’s brother’s kids in real life.
Eventually the boy who was the older kid, a teenager, came to me and confessed. He admitted that he was a small-time criminal and he had stolen the pills and sold them.
I knew I shouldn’t’ve taken the controlled substances at all, but the fact that I couldn’t bring them back to the pharmacy made it so much worse. I took him aside and told him that I was going to lose my job and that he’d better make it up to me. My suggestion was that we work together on a book blowing the proverbial lid off of the criminal group that he belonged to.
That wasn’t the book we ended up writing, though. The book we ended up with was the story of how I ended up in this situation and how I moved to and adjusted to the small Indiana town. Kind of a fish out of water story with a side order of the development of the fixer-upper house that was all I could afford.
I somehow got in with a traditional publisher for this and when I read the contract, I discovered that the publisher had the right of first refusal for a movie or television show based on the book. This means that if someone wants to make a movie or television show, the publisher gets first crack at it. My cousins and I got stars in our eyes for a moment but thought it’d never happen.
But then it did. The publisher (which turned out to be a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, since Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne showed up in the series) made a television series from it. There was a bit of conflict when my best friend (not someone I really know, btw) showed up convinced that she was going to play the part of my best friend in the series. Which, come to think of it, she actually did. She walked onto the set just before the actress who’d been cast in the role, and the director just let it go. That was odd.
Oh, well. Time for today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link. Let’s see. . . . City of the Plague God, by Sarwat Chadda seems to be up next. I really enjoyed this book, both as a book and in a sort of (insert Twilight Zone theme) kind of way.You see, City of the Plague God is the story of Sikander Aziz, the son of Iraqi immigrants, who runs afoul of Nergal, the titular plague god. Sik’s parents fall prey to a plague that threatens all of New York City and quite possibly the world. And it was just odd to have a book about a plague hitting New York City when Covid had hit New York City so hard and all.
Now, I guess it’s possible that this book went from idea to draft to publication in fewer than two years, but I just find it eerie when a book predicts future events. Another example is the Our Worlds at War Superman comic book storyline event, when an alien comes to Lex Luthor (at the time, President of the United States) and tells him to allow what is going to happen next to happen because, after all, all of the greatest presidents have wars to their name. And while I find it extremely unlikely that anything like that happened to George Bush fils, the fact remains that he was warned that 9/11 was coming, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. It was all very eerie as well, and one of my friends said that the storyline was a commentary on current events, and I had to point out to her that it was the storyline for summer 2001, before 9/11 even happened.