The tagline was: Beware the Darkness. But as I wrote the first draft, those words werenβt simply a marketing slogan. They carried a much darker and personal meaning.
My 2023 spooky season publication, This Is How He Collects Them, has a somewhat interesting backstory. Whenever Iβm at a book signing event, I tell readers who show an interest in the book about how the idea originated: with three vivid, bizarre dreams I had in the months leading up to writing the first draft in November of 2022.
THE DREAMS
The first dream began in a dark, dank elevator with a group of people I didnβt know. From what I recall, we ascended in silence until the elevator stopped. I could hear arguing outside followed by a scream. A loud snap followed, and the elevator began plunging to the ground.
The next thing I remember, everyone was dead, as the elevator car had crashed. I couldnβt move, and the bodies around me were horribly mutilated, and blood was everywhere. But almost immediately after seeing the carnage, weβre all alive, but now we are trapped in the elevator. Only the elevator has a glass door, and we are looking into a penthouse party. Nobody can hear us as we scream to get someoneβs attention. Finally, one man turns, walks up to us, and says: βThis is how he collects them.β (Yes, someone in my dream gave me the title for the novel.)
I woke up and immediately wrote down everything I could remember.
The next dream involved running from two shadowy figures who were chasing me down an alley. I was approaching a fence when I realized I had the ability to move things with my mind. I knocked over a couple pallets sitting next to a building before using my mind to rip a hole in the fence. I crawled out to safety. But then, I woke up in my bed. Curious about the telekinetic ability, I tried to move a glass of water on my desk using my mindβ¦and it moved! The next thing I remember, I woke up for real. I may have tried moving the glass after actually waking up, but it didnβt work. Have you ever had that dream within a dream thing? Itβs pretty wild.
Finally, as I had just decided NOT to write this novel for NaNoWriMo in 2022 (more on that below), I had a dream about my dad, who passed away a year and a half earlier. My memory of this dream is brief. In it, he was standing in front of me, and he said βFace the darkness. Fight the darkness. Beat the darkness.β
Although it wasnβt the only event to change my mind, it certainly gave me pause, and a little bit of confidence that had all but disappearedβ¦
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Back when NaNoWriMo was a thing (and they hadnβt shot themselves in the foot, then doubled down on their stupidity, thus putting themselves out of business), I decided to tackle what would be the most challenging manuscript Iβd ever attempted to write. Just a year prior, I failed at finishing my NaNo novel, and I wasnβt convinced I could pull it off one year later. But with the first two dreams, I knew I had something, so I started outlining, hoping it would eventually come together. The story was complicated, dark, and bizarre. It would become even darker as the year was nearing its end.
During the fall of 2022, I fell into the worst depression I had ever experienced. But I was hiding it. I wasnβt letting anyone see exactly where my head was at as I continued to go through the motions of life. It wasnβt like I had nothing going on at the time. At the end of September, I walked the red carpet for the premiere of Holes in the Sky (my first indie film role), and around the same time, I published The Man on the Roof at Midnight, thinking it was going to be the last thing I wrote for a long time. Frankly, I didnβt care about anything anymore, including writing. I did have a rough outline for This Is How He Collects Them, but Iβd stopped working on it weeks earlier. And I was no longer motivated to do what I loved doing so much.
After some heavy contemplation and soul searching over the next few weeks, though, I discovered that if I was going to come out of this depression and escape the dark place Iβd fallen into, I had to write the book. I thought if I channeled every bit of anger, hopelessness, sadness, and self doubt into this manuscript, that I could dig my way out of the darkness. This Is How He Collects Them went from being an idea too complicated to complete in one month, to the therapy I needed to pull me out of my depression. Oh, and I had also met the most amazing woman only a couple weeks before NaNo began, which provided the final bit of inspiration I needed to take on this challenge. (And since then, she has become my rock.)
The month of November in 2022 tested me like no other. I took this bizarre idea that didnβt have the greatest structure, and I turned it into a 60,000-word first draft that would eventually go on to push 80K by the time it was published. I look at it as the darkest story I have written, even if others may not see it that way. Perhaps itβs because I know how much of myself I put into the story through the various characters and the darkness I put each of them through during the drafting phase. Iβm not saying writing the draft was easy. Far from it. At times I didnβt think I would finish the first draft by the end of the month. And despite the βNaNo rules,β I still needed to follow through and reach the finish line for so many reasons, not just to βwinβ the challenge. This book was my therapy. And in the end, the novel that almost broke me is the one that brought me back.
I guess the moral of the story is: descending into a fictional world of your own creation can help you battle the demons you are facing. It did for me. Because it wasnβt just about a writing goal. It was also about facing the darkness, fighting the darkness, and beating the darkness.
In reality, I probably should have talked to someone, which is what I recommend to anyone battling depression or any mental health related issues. There is no shame in reaching out.
Eric Woods, Author 