Sleep Disorder

Afterword By Jack Ketchum

Collaboration's pretty natural for me.

I'm surprised it isn't for every writer.

What's writing after all but sophisticated, highly organized play? When you were a kid, who did you play with?

Other kids, of course.

Presuming you were lucky enough to have some around.

I sure did. I played alone back by the brook a lot. But I also played with all the other baby boomers on my small-town dead-end street. When they weren't kicking my butt, that is.

But any good game of King-of-the-Mountain or Cowboys `n Indians or Treasure Hunt is all about collaboration. About shared fantasy. Sure, you can argue about the rules now and then but if you're not really on the same page as your playmates, the game just won't work. You're shot down, you stay down. Period. You hope your luck's better next time.

When the fantasy really works it's hell to have to go home for dinner, too. You don't wanna. Same thing with writing. When you're on a roll, when you're inside the fantasy, you hate to have to quit. It's usually only exhaustion that makes you quit. Your body's call to dinner, so to speak.

Then, my first paying job in the arts was as a singer. Since I didn't play an instrument, a good piano player or guitarist was an absolute necessity — as important as remembering the lyrics to whatever Elvis, Jolsen, Beatles or folk song I was singing at the time. What was needed was a fellow traveler, somebody who was not just backing you up but was actively conspiring with you to seek out the meaning of the song and the feeling inside the melody and lyric. With the exception of the occasional a capella tune it was not something you could do alone. You needed collaboration.

Shortly afterwards I did a few seasons of summer stock. I was lucky. My fellow cast members, directors and production crews were good, hardworking people practically to a man. In fact over the course of four seasons I remember only one goddamn diva and nobody could stand her. And I think that there's nothing quite as satisfying as rehearsing a play with a group of like-minded souls whose only real goal is to get it right, to do your best to honor the drama and the production. To share whatever fantasy the author's set in motion.

By the time Ed Lee approached me to do a story together, I'd even collaborated twice on the writing end, many years before. As a young fresh-out-of-college teacher in Massachusetts I'd staged two original musical plays co-written by me and my cast of kids at Brookline High: Springs Comes Slowly Up This Way and The Lord High Teller of the Other From the Which.

Delightful experiences, both.

Of course they were. I was playing with kids again.

And hopefully what's come through in these stories more than anything is the fun Lee and I had creating them. There's nothing in here that's going to change foreign policy or save the whales or even break your heart. We did this just for fun, folks. And for no other reason whatsoever.

It's nearly ten years ago now since Lee first sent me a story of his called “I'd Do Anything For You”, so you'll have to pardon me if my memory's a bit shaky on specifics. I do recall that it was a finished story — Lee just wasn't happy with it. The first thing I did was change the word "do" in the title to the word "give". It seemed to me that poor Roderick's condition at the end simply demanded it. I may have provided the two-word punchline that caps the piece, I'm not sure.

But my job was largely editorial in nature. Lee tends to write long at least initially while I tend to write as compact as possible from the get-go so I know I did some cutting. I probably trimmed the sex scenes and some particularly colorful verbiage regarding male and female anatomy, social interaction and bodily fluids.

But as you know, I also left a whole lot in.

That accomplished, I sent my version back to Lee so he could do some fine-tuning and that was that.

A couple of years later he sent me “Love Letters From the Rain Forest”—also a complete manuscript — the correct tone of which seemed to be eluding him. I think I saw the problem almost immediately. His scientist, a highly educated man, has fallen for someone who in the original manuscript is an unregenerate slut and total bimbo. I softened her somewhat and bolstered him, brought the two characters together in some nether-region of the at least reasonably possible. And once again I did a bit of cutting. That one, as I recall, went back to Lee as did the first story and then back to me again for final polish.

It was four years before we'd work together again, this time on “Masks”, a story I'd begun but couldn't find the right ending for. It's rare that I begin a story without knowing almost exactly where I'm going but this time I did. I had the three initial masks down — the lioness, the owl, and the lamb — all of which entered the tale as written. I had the characters. And I had the premise, that masks were themselves magic and worn through the ages in nearly all civilizations in order to evoke it. But it was Lee who came up with the mysterious "mask within the mask" ending. I never would have got there on my own.

At the risk of embarrassing him, I think Lee's generally a much more imaginative plotter than I am. I tend to need a kind of reality-map to work from most of the time. Which is why so many of my stories proceed from fact. That's also why I went back to him twice more, once with a fragment and once with a completed story, to solve each of their particular problems. The fragment — a relatively long one — was “Eyes Left”, which I'd originally conceived for the John Skipp's Mondo Zombie anthology and then dumped in favor of one called The Visitor. Again I had the basics, a small group of barfly buddies gathered at their local waterhole watching the girls go by. Only this time some of the girls are dead. And one of them looks just like Daryl Hannah, who I actually did see stroll by the window of the World Cafe one rainy summer afternoon, tight wet t-shirt and all.

Memorable.

But I didn't know where the story was leading. I sent a copy to Lee. He did.

He took it to her apartment and the mayhem which ensues.

Finally, “Sleep Disorder” was a finished yarn I'd originally titled “Good Seeing You”. This time I did have the ending but it struck me as flat. Hell, it was flat, and obscure to boot. My ending had our main character eventually morphing into what he dreamed, a surreal conceit similar to what I'd done years before with “The Holding Cell”, a much better tale than this one. Until Lee got hold of it. We had a couple of phone conversations and Lee said he could go one of two ways, either work with the ending as-is or conceive a new one which would have more kick. I said go with your gut, with the kick, and I'm glad he did.

I came up with the title change eventually and Lee approved it, and then we swapped it back and forth as we had the other stories for polish. He'd tinker here, I'd tinker there. Nothing major.

Just us playing.