Okay, But What Is Where the Dust Still Glows Actually About?
Your questions, answered, because I clearly didn't do this part well
I hit upload on Where the Dust Still Glows. It's a fantastic story and I love it.
And you — my readers — have let me know, kindly but unmistakably, that I did a terrible job marketing it. Several of you said some version of I have no idea what this book is even about.
Fair. That's on me. So I collected the questions you sent in and I'm going to answer them.
What kind of book is this?
You're asking what genre, and here's the thing: I like mashing genres together, and this time I did a super job of it. You're welcome.
It's science fiction fantasy with some urban fantasy in it.
Where does it sit on action? There is action. But it also has a women's-fiction feel, because you get to sit down and spend real time with these characters. I got a little tired of writing fast-paced action books, so I'm having an enormous amount of fun sitting back and getting to know people while their story unfolds — giving them room to actually experience the things they're doing and learning.
We start on a different planet. Then there's Dreamland, which looks and feels like a very fantasy landscape and is actually a program. A matrix.
You see it from a couple of angles. There are two main POVs, and one of them belongs to a Dream Lord who shows you how the matrix works.
That layer was the thing I struggled with most, because I originally told this story from the inside out — entirely from the Dreamlanders' experience, where they're just living their lives, man. They don't know they're in a matrix. They don't know they're programs. They don't know they're AI. They're just people doing things and working out what that means.
My early readers found that intensely frustrating. I don't understand what's going on here. So I pulled the camera back a little, which gave the book its science fiction spine and made everything legible. It was the right call.
This is a feel-good story. It's also one you want to read when you've got some energy and some brain, not while half asleep.
I've been in Dreamland for three and a half decades, which is probably why it all feels simple to me. Don't let that scare you off. I fought really hard to make this fun. Just absolute fun.
Who is Lixiss?
You're going to love Lixiss, because I love Lixiss.
She showed up entirely by accident. This book was never supposed to be hers — it was going to be Teddie's. You do meet Teddie here, and she's active in the next book. She's from Earth, and I was going to use her as your way into Dreamland, since Teddie can explain things in our language. She's from now. That's where the urban-fantasy feel comes from: we hop into her timeline on Earth, an alternate reality set in roughly our own era, so the technology is there and the lingo is our lingo.
Then Lixiss happened.
I was trying to get back into writing after a long break, and I needed my juices to kick up. Dreamland has always been that for me — when I need to get excited about something, I write in Dreamland, because there's no limit to the kind of story I can tell there.
I was writing my way through a rough stretch and I remember thinking: I really need a light. I'm struggling to find my inner one.
And then, the way my mind does, this character just came to be. She arrived all smiles. We talked. I felt genuinely good afterward — that conversation is documented somewhere in my deleted scenes — and I realized I'd been relit a little. The spark came back.
So I thought, huh. I think I just found another Dreamlander.
That sent me down a rabbit hole of Dreamlander profiles, and all of it kept coming back to her. The more I dug, the clearer it got that this needed to be her story too.
Here's why. Lixiss is in a rediscovery phase, and so am I. I've hit a point where the things that got me here are not the things that will carry me forward, and the parts of myself I've collected along the way aren't necessarily the parts that come with me. My kids are getting older. My husband's getting older. I'm not working the way I was. All those roles had boundaries on who I was, and I'm not that anymore.
So what am I now? What makes a person? What makes me me? How do I choose which parts to take?
I needed an avenue for that conversation, and AI blew up in the culture at exactly the same moment. (AI has been in literature for a very long time. This is just the latest round of the conversation.) So I asked: what if Lixiss is actually a program?
That was a development I'd never had before, and it's a very good thing I'd pulled my previously published Dreamland stories — because I hadn't fully understood how any of it operated. My mind works weird. I come up with an idea and go can it just work like this? I think that's exactly why readers struggled with early Dreamland. I hadn't built it enough to tell it.
Stephen King says know seventy-five percent more than what you put on the page. I know he said it. I've also read his books, and sir — did you actually do the thing you told us to do? Because I remember a page and a half about something ridiculously small.
But have I read my own books? Yes I have. Shush. We develop as authors.
So: Lixiss is a program, and she did not come from the Dream Lord who wrote the Dreamlander code. There's a mystery in that. She was supposed to relight dream planes — the places dreamers come to dance and have a merry time and leave full of hope, ready for the new day, dreamers of all ages.
Instead she finds dreamers like me, the ones struggling to find their hope, and she says: here, let's just light it. There you go. You're good. Now keep going.
And she's learning what it means to be a person while she does it. She's naive and fresh and it was wonderful to write her.
Who is Yade?
Another Dreamlander, so another program. And she's the one who broke everything.
Also not intentional. I'd assumed that would be Harley, who is my all-time favorite character out of everyone I've created across forty-odd years of writing (I've been writing since I was a kid, so let's just say many, many years). I really thought Harley would be the one. Then I actually looked at what everybody in the book does, and went no, no, no. It's Yade.
In my first several drafts she was shallow, and I couldn't work out what the pull between her and Lixiss even was. Then it landed: the things Lixiss has to do to become a person, Yade has to do too. You have to act, and have an effect on other people, to build a connection. You give a piece of yourself and take a piece of someone else through the interactions you have, and it has to mean something.
That forced me to get to know her.
Yade connects with dream dust in a way that sets her apart. When she's in a single space, she isn't necessarily in a single time — she drifts in and out of it. What we perceive as her form mostly stays put, but she'll drift out of a conversation and come back, drift out and come back.
Which means her dialogue has a truly alarming number of ellipses in it. I'm fairly sure I'm going to annoy the absolute frell out of some of you, and I'm sorry, but that's how she talks.
What she has is a real sense of what it means to belong to Dreamland, and to belong to another person. She's the pull on Lixiss that says: please exist. Please exist with me.
That was a call I needed to hear. It felt wonderful to feel it. And I'm honestly not sure where I'm taking her, because what she can do opens a lot of doors.
What is Dreamland?
Okay. Settle in, because this is the one I keep tossing back and forth.
A long, long time ago, human beings were on a planet, and we overpopulated it and stripped the resources, because we had to in order to survive. We built our cities way, way up — an entire planet blanketed in skyscrapers. And we sent out ships to colonize other worlds, so there are humans on a lot of planets now.
Getting between solar systems takes for freaking ever. But we found a fold in space and time. Not exactly a wormhole. Take a piece of paper and crumple it — that's Dreamland. There's a planet here, and here, and here, and the whole thing is always moving in and out.
I'm sure that sounded great. I'm glad I did that.
So that fold became both the place and the method we used to travel between worlds, because it shortened the distance and the time.
Then we discovered that interacting with it was making it unstable. Physical components — our ships, our fuel, our energy, just existing in physical form inside that space — destabilized it, and there were real concerns it could blow and decimate the galaxy. Which would be bad. So travel stopped.
Then some very smart people had an epiphany: what if we use it to host a matrix instead? A mind meld. We build a program in there, put a bunch of different places inside it, and suddenly we can communicate across all these worlds without being there physically. Mostly telepathy. Not much light, not much sound.
How does that actually work? I don't know. I'm not a scientist. I'm telling you how I came up with it.
So we had a communication method. And then another group of scientists said: you know what, we're kind of awful. We go conquer worlds and then destroy a lot of them. What if we built an experiment to try and fix that?
So we reach into people while they're sleeping and pull them into the matrix.
That's what all of it is. Dream planes, nightmare bubbles, burbs — every one of them is a different experiment, all running toward the same question: how do we stop being assholes.
That's Dreamland. That's how it started and that's where it lives.
And it's staffed. Dustmen get recruited from each of the planets as they die — instead of heaven or hell or Valhalla or wherever they were headed, they come to Dreamland and serve the dreamers by filling them with joy. Nightmares get recruited the same way, and their job is to make dreamers face their fears so they come out stronger.
All of these elements feeding into each other is so much fun. It is so much fun.
How does this connect to the Whiskey Witches books?
It connects through the Para Wars, the seven-book series — so if you read those, this next part is for you.
In Dexx's final battle at the end of that series, the kill releases an enormous amount of energy. And because everything is connected through Dreamland, that energy ripples out across the galaxy. It hits Dreamland and goes everywhere.
On Earth, it wakes up new abilities.
Which means we now have dream walkers. And that's who Teddie is.
Am I getting into that right now? No, because I've already gone long — but that's what happens when you get me talking about something I love. There is a great deal percolating over in the Whiskey verse.
So should you read it?
I'm really excited about this book. I hope you are too.
What I'm actually hoping is that you pick it up and get to the end and think: you know what, this does kind of make sense. Not that I'm silly and weird.
I mean, I am silly and weird. You can say that to my face. That's fine.
But I love this book, and it came out well, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Where the Dust Still Glows is out now on Amazon and free in Kindle Unlimited.
For readers of Blood Over Bright Haven and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Still have a question I didn't answer? Come ask me in the Trauma Llama Slayers on Facebook. That's genuinely how this post got written.
Happy reading. 🦙
