Imagine this.
One night, you dream that the Roman Empire never ended. Queen Kleopatra and Mark Antony won their war against Rome and created a magnificent new empire, combining the splendor, learning, power, and excesses of Greece, Rome, and Egypt.
And in that dream, you are living another version of your life. You are still you. And yet you are not.
In this world, the one in which I actually live, I trained in costume design. I worked in fashion as a model and stylist. In the dream world, I was the personal designer to the Empress, and her signature look was a magnificent cape. I was perfectly suited to this job as my family had the patent on the empire’s finest fabrics for one thousand years.
Extraordinary dream, right? Except it didn’t end. Night after night, I went back, and the story continued. The people remembered me. Relationships deepened. Conflicts carried over from one dream to the next. The world became more vivid, more intricate, and eventually, much more dangerous.
At first, I was fascinated by the Empress. It seemed that she respected my talent and considered me a friend and confidante. Then I began to fear her.
I also began to understand that my husband and I might not be on the same side. That was perhaps the most disturbing part. I loved him. We were very close. I loved our home, our children, our family life. I loved the Empress too, or at least I believed I did.
And yet the anxiety was real. Something was wrong beneath the beauty of this extraordinary civilization. Something was happening around us that I did not completely understand.
What would you do? Wake up and dismiss it as a particularly elaborate dream? That would have been sensible.
For five years, I kept returning to that other life in my dreams. During all that time, I told no one about them. They felt strangely private, as if I were describing memories rather than dreams.
Eventually, I mentioned the dreams to my dear friend Denise. I told her about this other empire in which I was the Empress’s designer. I described my children, my husband, and the home we lived in together. About the fear that had begun creeping into what had once seemed like a magnificent life.
Denise became very excited. “Why aren’t you writing this?” she asked. “I want to read that.”
Absolutely not, I told her. These were dreams. Dreams were not the basis of a novel. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to admit that I had been living a second life in a futuristic empire every night. It could make me sound a bit crazy, right?
Still, Denise’s question stayed with me, but still I did nothing. Then one day, I sat down at my laptop to check my email, and I started writing about this world. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. The world already existed: its imperial politics, clothing, technology, rivalries, marriages, secrets, and dangers.
Most unsettling of all, the people existed. They had been waiting for me night after night. And so, I began to write. The woman I had been in those dreams became Elissa Valeria, designer to the Empress of The Harmonia. The husband I loved but had begun to distrust became Theron Valerius. The beautiful civilization I had wandered through revealed the machinery beneath its elegance.
And the Empress? I discovered that I had been right to fear her.
That is where The Empress’s Cape begins.