Novelists sometimes get their ideas from unusual places.
In Jason Albee’s case, the storyline for his first novel came to him while he was asleep.
“I had a dream about being on a train,” said the Vancouver 38-year-old. “In the dream, I was married, or had this girlfriend, and she died, and we were trying to figure out who did it.”
That dream led to the basic storyline for his book, “The Train Ride Home,” which was just released through Double Dragon Publishing.
“It’s about a guy who gets a train ticket to another world,” Albee said. “It’s a snowy world, and he falls in love with somebody and gets her to marry him.”
The dark qualities of the dream also come through in the book, with plotlines about murder, the mafia and family.
Albee has written other short stories from dreams, but this is the first time he’s expanded one into a novel.
It probably won’t be the last one either, he said.
“I have a few other manuscripts I’m working on now that came from dreams,” Albee said.
His book is available through http://www.lulu.com and other sites.
Poems prove therapeutic for recovering addict
A trucker’s horn ended up saving Art Wedmore’s life.
Wedmore, 61, of Vancouver, was addicted to alcohol and sex when, on Aug. 21, 2010, his problems seemed so bad that the Vietnam-era veteran was ready to end his life.
“I hit rock bottom for my addiction, and I decided to jump off the I-205 bridge,” Wedmore said. “And when I was standing there, somebody in a truck honked at me. It was like an angel.”
The horn made him reconsider what he was about to do. So he went home to his wife and decided to check himself in to the Veterans Affairs Hospital instead of killing himself.
The treatment worked, and he’s been sober since the incident, he said.
“As part of my therapy, I started writing poems,” Wedmore said. “I used to do that when I was a kid. I wrote a poem a week for 37 weeks while I was going through treatment.”
He shared his poems with others in recovery, and they suggested he turn them into a book.
He just self-published the 37 poems under the title “Self Inflicted Death Sentence: A True Story in Poetry of Sex, Alcohol, Deceit, Betrayal & the Process of Recovery One Day at a Time.”
He hopes the book will help others struggling with addictions, he said.
People can buy it through his Web site at http://www.artwedmoreauthor.com, and the ebook version will soon be available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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