Time to flip open the ol' laptop and get his day started.​

     Where was he again?

​     Oh yes. He had two of his heroes in real pickles. One had a smashed leg and was in the care of a coven of witches. The other one was trapped in a starship prison.

     Damn. Trevor just couldn't get himself into it. He couldn't work up enough creative energy to propel his characters forward. This was the ninth book in the series, he knew his characters through and through, he knew the universe they dwelled in through and through, and now it all kind of bored the shit out of him. He considered himself a professional, though, and this was hardly the first time he'd ever begun his day without the slightest urge to write. He'd come up with more than a few tricks to get his imagination kickstarted over the years. but now he felt like he had to kickstart the ​kickstarts. 

     It all came down to the dream he'd had the night before. It had been so vivid. He couldn't shake it. There were aliens in the action series he wrote, but they seemed so unimaginative and cliched in comparison to the creatures that now overran his internal universe. 

     He stared at the screen for an hour, until it all got just too friggin' frustrating, until he thought, I can't stand this. I've got to get out of here, get some fresh air, take a walk to calm my scrambled head. 

     And that did seem to help. Trevor liked to walk, anyway. His mind mellowed when he walked. He took in the reality of the trees, the mailboxes, the pedestrians and the apartment buildings and the shops he saw in every direction he looked. 

     He breathed in the aroma of fresh bread as he passed a deli. 

     This is where I live, he thought. This is reality. No evil toads here, no dark forces warring to consume the multiverse, just Trevor Harper walking down a normal city street on a normal day like any other. 

     A couple came out of the deli.

     So they could get through the exit, one woman followed the other.

     Both women carried small, paper bags.

     The woman in front stopped dead in her tracks to keep from slamming into Trevor, which caused the woman behind her to have to stop dead in ​her tracks. 

     That second woman's eyes locked with Trevor's...

     and, in that moment, all that shit about living in "reality" evaporated.

     Trevor felt like he might faint.

​     And she looked like she had the same damned reaction.

     "Niki," he said.

     "Trevor," she replied.

     So far as either of them knew, they'd never seen each other before in their lives.

​ CONTINUE