'The Girl Who Writes From Dreams' Escaping Dreams, Bronwen Winter Phoenix's debut novel will be released this summer but Bronwen has revealed her ideas come from somewhere just a little bit extraordinary. "I write from dreams," said Bronwen, "I have the most vivid dreams that sometimes play out like movies and sometimes they are highly complicated, twisted and even horrific in detail. They are emotional too. They can scare me sometimes." Escaping Dreams is fantasy/horror fiction and based on a world called Orenia. It focuses on two main characters; Xanther Aerts, an unlikely hero finds a newfound freedom, having confined himself to his apartment. He suffers from a form of agoraphobia which means he is only able to leave his house at night under the cover of darkness. When he meets Beth Elretha by chance and saves her life, they are thrown together in a journey of epic proportions. Beth's dreams haunt her every-day life and it soon becomes apparent she is not all that she seems – she is in fact from another world. The action centres on a dying town overrun by gangs, including Sam Cullen's. As the town grows more deserted the extremity of the situation brings to life the underground which holds a flourishing city, a city where Beth first found her new home. As her secret starts to escape her she must defend all that she holds dear, against the once-powerful race of the Chaka. Bronwen, 23 from Glasgow, Scotland said, "The story starts off quite dark but then light shines through. I tried to fill my writing with beauty as well as horror." "Writing from dreams feels more like writing from a memory than something made up in your mind. It's like the story has already happened and you're just writing it down. My dreams are almost like a trip to the zoo on acid." Bronwen's second novel is 'Nightswallow', a more mainstream horror story which deals with the eventuality of death and also love. She is currently working on her third novel, an Edinburgh crime thriller entitled Grassmarket Blood. |