ABOUT THE CONCEPT

Recently I watched a Dateline program about a teen who was kidnapped by someone she thought was a friend and then delivered to a house where she was raped repeatedly. The first thought that popped into my mind was, "It's still going on." They brought out the fact that for years and years girls have been kidnapped by people they knew and sold to so-called "white slavers". These girls aren't the ones who come to this country and literally work off their passage. They're American citizens who aren't any different than the teen who might live down the street from you.

I knew that the program wasn't far fetched, because the first little spark of an idea that eventually became the cornerstone of my book was actually inspired by a story not very different than the one on Dateline. But, the story I knew of happened about fifty years ago.

So, Jen Connor, the protagonist in "A Dream Lost", while a fictional character, could have been any of many girls who have lived through this horror, and some who didn't survive. As I created Jen, I knew she had to be naive, vulnerable and beautiful. She also had to have the ability to reach inside herself and find strength she didn't know she had, because without it she couldn't survive.

Every day I had different ideas for this story, but remember, I didn't know how to write fiction at the time. So I wanted to use every device, every cliche, every flowery bit of language my brain could create. Ah, the words and the story flowed, and I created more characters, never realizing what a hack job I was doing.

Jen started out as Shawn, and with every revision, every re-write, she had a new name. From Katherine, to Sandra, her names ran the spectrum until I settled upon Jeanette (a popular name of her era), with the nicknames of Jen and Jenny. The more I learned about the craft, the more she became a person to me. No longer a one-dimensional cardboard character, I really began to care about her and the torment she was going through.

I discovered that when I wrote Jen's scenes I felt her emotions and pain. Sometimes, I would be sitting at the computer crying as I wrote because a situation was so unbearable. People who have read the drafts must have felt what I did, because everyone became very protective of her. Would she make it? Would she survive? Quite frankly I wasn't sure myself.

In those days, I didn't write with a plot sheet or outline. I just sat down and wrote, so some of the things that happened were as much a surprise to me as they were to her.

Okay, that's where we leave off today. Watch for the next post.

--Arliss