If Everyone Forgot You, Would They Find You Again?

What writing Where the Dust Still Glows taught me about memory, usefulness, and turning fifty

If someone erased every memory other people had of you, would they remember you anyway? That's the question that hijacked this book, and it was not the plan. I sat down to write two women in a dying dreamworld, and somewhere in the middle my own brain went oh hey, while we're in here and started rearranging my furniture.

So let me tell you about the book first, because the book is the fun part. Then I'll tell you what it did to me.

Lixiss and Yade, and the jobs they're bad at

Lixiss is a lumineer. That's a Dreamlander caste, and lumineers relight dream planes — the places dreamers show up at night to have fun and relight the hope in their own souls, so that when they wake up in the real world they aren't stuck in the mires of depression.

That's the job. Lixiss does not do that job.

What she does instead is light dreamers. She gets called to one specific person and relights the spark of hope inside that one soul. Which is not what a lumineer is for. Nobody designed her to do it. Nobody can explain why she can.

Then there's Yade. Yade was born into the mechanic caste, which means she's supposed to fix anything on the dream planes that supports the dreamer. Dreamland was created to support human dreamers and help them figure out how to be better human beings, and mechanics keep that machinery running.

Yade doesn't fix any of that. She fixes the things that support Dreamlanders.

I remember noticing that and thinking, huh. That's really neat. I wonder if there's something going on underneath. (There's always something going on underneath. A spade is never just a spade. Ask me how I know.)

So both of these women are bucking the system they were cast into. In a world built on function, that's not a quirk. It's a defect.

And they keep getting reset. Memories wiped, personalities reset, mistakes erased — and sometimes the lessons those mistakes taught them get erased right along with the mistake, which is arguably worse.

Almost every single time, they find each other anyway. They don't remember each other. They're drawn to each other regardless.

That's when the book stopped being a fun little dreamworld story and started being about me.

The caste I was born into

I'm hitting fifty next month. I am not where I wanted to be. I'm really hoping the next era is amazing, and right now I'm mostly questioning every life choice that got me here.

One of the biggest things in my entire life has been bucking the system I was born into.

My dad was in the Marine Corps. When he got out, he went into the coal mines. So I'm a military brat and a coal miner's daughter. He eventually got out of the mines and went into construction, and I followed him into construction — after I'd already followed him into the military, and after I'd followed him briefly into the mines (not for long). Apparently I was daddy's girl. Whatever.

The point is, I always wanted to grow out of that. Not out of him. Out of the boundaries I'd been born inside of.

I wanted to make more money, sure, but that wasn't the driving force. I wanted to travel. I still want to travel. I wanted a higher value of life — I wanted to stop being constantly chased and shaped by the fear of survival. I didn't want to live in survival mode, and more than that, I didn't want to get so beaten down by survival mode that I'd just accept being garbage.

Let me say the obvious thing out loud: poor people are not garbage. That's not what I mean. I mean that's how I felt. Standing at the bottom looking up at everybody above me, I felt like I was being treated like garbage, looked at like garbage, and always, permanently, less than.

I am still a hair's breadth from that feeling. To this day. It is not something I get to shuck off and go oh, that's not me anymore.

So when I wrote two women who were built into a caste, told what they were for, and then quietly refused — yeah. That wasn't an accident.

Would the people I love remember me?

Here's the other half of it, and this one's meaner.

If the people I love got reset — if every memory of me were stripped out of them — would they remember me?

And then, immediately behind that: why would they?

That question matters more now than it used to, because so many of us are attached to our phones. Addicted to them. Addicted to being entertained every waking second.

Think about the dinner table. That's if you can even get people to the dinner table. Most everybody's on their phone. They might be sort of talking to each other. There might be a little sniping. Sometimes they'll talk about a video they're watching or a game they're playing.

They are not connecting.

So if we're not really connecting on a daily basis, and our memories got stripped for whatever reason, and we weren't reconnecting with the life we're actually living — are we living it?

And if the answer is no, is that worth changing?

We adopted this way of living for a reason. It's easier. There's less resistance. It's less confrontational. There's less decision fatigue. You never have to worry about pissing somebody off, because it doesn't matter, because you're not really there.

You're here. (I was pointing at my phone.)

What I want to carry into the next twenty years

A lot of the identification markers that got me to this point are changing shape. Mother. Wife. Employee. Those aren't gone, exactly. The shape of them has changed. That personality cage has changed shape, and I'm rattling around in it differently than I used to.

So I've been asking which parts of my past selves I actually want to carry into the next ten years. The next twenty.

Having written this book, here's what I landed on. I want to be more than the person who fixes things. More than the person who takes care of things and coordinates things.

I want to actively participate. I want to be a person in the real world.

That requires a lot to change, and most of it comes down to intentionality. You can't inhabit space next to another human being and be checked out. You have to embrace the full experience of a moment, which includes letting yourself be wrong, because you don't need to be right all the time. You actually learn more from getting things wrong than you ever will from getting them right.

Being unencumbered by the fear of having to be correct would make existing so much easier.

I think we've lost a lot of adaptability and flexibility and accountability in the digital age, because we can hide behind a video, a camera, a text message. That's not what I meant. You just didn't get my tone.

(Side note that still floors me: if you use punctuation in a text message, apparently you're yelling. I wasn't yelling. I was using grammar. I'm a writer. Maybe there are just some things I don't get.)

What I actually want is to be a person who matters to other people. And I think a lot of us would rather hide from what that requires, because it's hard.

In fiction it's easy. You write quirky, snarky conversations, everybody understands exactly what everybody means, there's an occasional blow-up and then it turns and everything's fine, because that's how you orchestrated it.

Real life doesn't orchestrate. You have zero control over how anyone reacts, because that person might be reacting to the fact that they haven't eaten since yesterday and totally forgot, or didn't drink any water, or has been holding it all day because they can't poop in public. Or they couldn't find their favorite cup. Or the dryer ate one of their lucky socks.

You don't know what's going to set somebody off. And your own gut reaction isn't fully controllable either. Even when you're emotionally responsible, sometimes the reaction fires and your only options are pause-think-respond, or let it rip and clean up the mess afterward.

What Lixiss doesn't know yet

I got to push all of that through Lixiss and Yade. Play with a few ideas, get them wrong, get them right, ask what it means and what the impacts are.

Because Lixiss has no idea. She doesn't understand what it means to shape who she wants to be — who she is has always been dictated to her and controlled by other people. She gets handed one small opportunity to push back, and she doesn't fully understand the gravity of it, or the responsibility, or how impactful that little bit of freedom is about to be.

Writing her was genuinely fun. It was also, in this rediscovery stage of my life, weirdly useful. It helped me answer a few questions. There are bridges I'm coming up to and forks I'm going to have to pick, and this book handed me something to pick with.

That's what I want out of fiction. I love reading stories that give me the willpower and the ammunition to have the hard conversations, so I can do better and do things the way I actually want to do them.

If that's what you want too, come meet Lixiss and Yade.

Questions Readers Ask Me About This Book

What is Where the Dust Still Glows actually about?

Two created beings who aren't doing the jobs they were built for, in a dreamworld that's dying. Lixiss was made to relight dream planes and lights individual dreamers instead. Yade was made to fix the machinery and fixes the places nobody else can reach. In Dreamland, things that stop serving their purpose don't get accommodations. They get replaced. And the two of them are starting to work out that this isn't the first time it's happened to them.

Is it science fiction or fantasy?

Both, and I'd shelve it as dystopian science fantasy. There's a caste-locked society, created beings, and a dying machine-world, which is the science fiction half. There's dream dust, dream planes, and gods with excellent PR, which is the fantasy half. If you liked Blood Over Bright Haven or The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, you're in the right neighborhood.

Is the Lixiss and Yade relationship a romance?

No. It's the deepest bond in the book and it is a friendship — two people who have found each other three hundred and ten times without remembering they'd ever done it before. If you came for a romance you'll be disappointed, and I'd rather tell you now than have you find out at 40%.

Do I need to read anything else first?

Nope. This is book one of the Dream Lord Wars and it's a clean starting point. If you've read my Whiskey Witches books you'll spot a thread or two, and if you haven't, you won't miss anything.

Is it in Kindle Unlimited?

Yes. It's on Amazon and currently in KU, so if you're a subscriber it costs you nothing but the hours.

Where does Dreamland come from?

Twenty years of my subconscious refusing to let it go. I wrote the long version of that story in a separate essay about Harley, Dreyma, and why Dreamlanders don't dream — that one's worth reading if this post got its hooks in you.

Where the Dust Still Glows is out now on Amazon and free in Kindle Unlimited.

When you're done, leave a review and let me know how it went. Two sentences does more for this book than anything I could buy.

Happy reading. 🦙