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Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams is a short novel I recently wrote. It took me exactly 10 days to go from “blank page” to “edited, ready for publishing”. Of course this is unusual even by my standards (writing short, abstract, poetic fiction).

What made this possible – and at the same time very easy and pleasurable – was a concordance between methodology and subject matter.

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams is probably the most free-styling, artistic kind of work I’ve written that still counts as prose. I certainly can detect an evolution in my literary production, with novels like The Storytelling Cat being far more abstract, artistic, poetic than my earlier works.

So where does Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams sit in all that? Let me explain…

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams: The Basics

The designation “Basics” is highly suspect here. It promises something simple, easy-to-digest, but the truth is somewhat more complex.

In a sense, “The Basics” refers to offering some sort of blurb (every book needs a synopsis, right? Right?) and description of “what the book is about”. But let’s see what the characters themselves have to say about this. Here’s a direct quotation from the novel:

Sounds familiar? Take a look at my post announcing The Perfect Gray and you’ll find this:

It’s always hard for writers to tell you what their book is about. But I think you’ll like it.

In any case, if you really want a description, Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams is dreamlike, hallucinatory, elliptical, avoids explanations, at times it’s almost (but not) a collection of scenes.

Still want a blurb? Well, you asked for it…

In the hypnotic, ever-moving urban flow of Athens, Marios leads a solitary and unexciting existence. Part-time baggage handler, food delivery courier, and rental apartment assistant, the young man feels neither motivated nor disappointed, neither happy nor sad – not even when his nights are gradually disrupted by an odd case of insomnia – and each day morphs into the next like a blurred dream.

But dreams and hallucinations hide their own realities (that include old men bearing a curious resemblance to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, as well as cats drinking whiskey and delivering sermons), and for Marios – or was it Michalis? – the mixing of past choices and future repercussions brings with it dangerous possibilities.

Methodology and Subject Matter

Now, let’s talk methodology…

I started writing without any plan whatsoever; about plot, characters, anything. I just told myself, Young guy in Athens, and began typing. I’ve never done this before; although I’m the last person you’d call a plotter, I’m also certainly not a pantser either. Still, every book I’ve written so far contained some sort of preparatory notes and design.

Hell, I’ve even made a whole program for such a purpose…

The book consists of short, disconnected scenes of the protagonist’s everyday dreary (I guess the fancier term would be “alienated”) existence that become increasingly more hallucinatory. It’s magical realism, with my trademark metatextual, self-referential wink-wink, nudge-nudge hat tips to some other of my books but also to the concept of (literary) creation.

This is the key reason why this methodology worked: It had a direct connection with the subject matter, the concepts involved. Such a method would almost certainly be catastrophic for genres relying heavily on plot, such as detective fiction.

Obviously, this is a book that would under no circumstances work if it were any longer. Indeed, it is meant to be read in a single session (that should take about 3 and a half hours or so).

Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams: My Way of Fracturing Reality

Both as a reader and as a writer, I prefer novels that are less novel-like (a vast, decades-spanning exploration of families, generations, societies) and more poetry-like (an abstract, ambiguous dip in an alien ocean of something that isn’t what it appears). Probably my most favorite book of all time is Untold Night and Day, and Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams ended up being a homage of sorts, for reasons you’ll understand better if you read my review of Bae Suah’s novel.

Most readers probably don’t care about my kind of literary art. All the power to them. But this kind of fiction is the only way for me to fracture reality in a way it makes sense to me.

As I’ve often said, there is a paradox involved: I don’t care about my audience, but writing (overall, creating) with only myself as the intended audience is the only way for me to create something that might be of use (philosophically or artisticallyThis is a trick. To paraphrase a character in Sleeping in the City of Abandoned Dreams, it is idiocy to think philosophy and art are not two facets of one and the same truth.) to anyone else.

To recall David Foster Wallace, “What the really great artists do is that they’re entirely themselves… They have their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

The designation “artist” (let alone “really great artist”), like “philosopher”, is one I wouldn’t dare to give myself; let others do it for me (after I’m dead, perhaps). But Wallace is absolutely right on this. The only chance to create something worth a damn is to do it the way you goddamn feel like.

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Most of my fiction is available as an immediate free download – simply visit the Fiction page on the main site.

Note: I’ve also composed a postrock/postmetal album inspired by the novel.