Kerry Schafer | Venturing into the Great What If

What if?

This is one of my favorite expressions in the English language – one that inspires many of my most creative ideas, but sometimes gets me into trouble. I try to use its powers for good, but there are episodes to the contrary. Case in point: the officially sponsored teen camping expedition during which I said to my friends, "What if we put earthworms in somebody's sleeping bag?"

In case you too have a curious sort of a mind, I will tell you that the outcome of that enterprise involved ear-splitting shrieks, an episode of girl-on-girl hate, and epic unhappiness and threats of retribution from chaperoning adults. I could also mention the camping trip way out in the middle of nowhere involving a young man who asked himself, "What if I wore this bearskin rug down to the campfire in the dark?"

But that was neither my transgression nor my idiocy, and I digress.

When I sat down to write the story that eventually morphed into Between , I started with the usual question, this time in the format of, "What if you woke up one day and discovered that reality had completely shifted during the night?" This entertaining premise took me on a wild ride through half a dozen different rabbit holes.

For example - what if the world around you just changed randomly, without warning? You're sitting at your kitchen table drinking coffee, and bam! Your house is now filled with snow and there are penguins doing belly-slides down your staircase. Or, when you open the door to your bedroom you find yourself looking into a mirror image of your entire house, backwards and upside down. Or maybe everything around you suddenly curves and bends and you're inside a giant hamster ball and can't get out.

Writing my way through these realities was fun, but both my overloaded brain and my long-suffering main character, Vivian, needed more of an anchor. One day while I was trying to get a grip on the world building, Vivian took matters into her own capable hands. She sat me down, gave me cookies and milk, and typed the sentence fragment that changed everything for both of us - "…in all the worlds, dreamworld, wakeworld, and between."

"Hmmm", said I, between bites of cookie. "What if…?"

And the rest is history.

Summary of Between

Vivian Maylor can’t sleep. Maybe it’s because she just broke up with her boyfriend and moved to a new town, or it could be the stress of her new job at the hospital. But perhaps it’s because her dreams have started to bleed through into her waking hours.

All of her life Vivian has rejected her mother’s insane ramblings about Dreamworlds for concrete science and fact, until an emergency room patient ranting about dragons spontaneously combusts before her eyes—forcing Viv to consider the idea that her visions of mythical beasts might be real.

And when a chance encounter leads her to a man she knows only from her dreams, Vivian finds herself falling into a world that seems strange and familiar all at once—a world where the line between dream and reality is hard to determine, and hard to control…