Books

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Dream Diaries

The books in the Dream Diary series are simply archived blog posts from years past. So if you like my current blog posts, you might like these old ones as well. 

Every couple of years, I get concerned that I may have posted something inappropriate, so I take down my posts and go through them more carefully, clarifying, organizing, and refining the ideas in the posts while trying to preserve their authenticity. 

The posts follow a regular format: my best recollection of a dream from the night before, then an interpretation of what the dream might symbolize, given my life’s circumstances. 

I end up with a diary of things I never would have thought to write about using just my conscious mind. 

Although I write mainly to remember my own life (I am inclined to forget most of it), some of the dreams are colorful and could interest a more general audience. Some examples of things I’ve dreamed about include: aliens breaking in through my bedroom window, telekinesis, glowing orbs that defy the laws of physics, watching my professor plan a murder, pushing a velociraptor out of a window, and swimming in the air. 

Naja Tau’s Dream Diary has been online since 2012, and continues in 2024. 

Lost Atlantis

Lost Atlantis is a five-part space opera written to help me come to terms with the effects of having mentally ill parents. 

Atlantis is beneath the deep ocean, encased by the mysterious “white stone”-- a rock with almost magical strength and properties. The population of Atlantis is completely unaware of a world outside of itself. 

Atlantis is plagued by famine, drought, and civil war, and is run by an emperor concerned only with fulfilling his own needs. 

White Sand is a young, preteen girl who escapes from her troubled childhood with her abusive, schizophrenic father into the Imperial Army. There, she meets a man who believes in her, despite her many disciplinary infractions. He recruits her into a secret society of assassins, where she hones and refines her natural talent for martial arts, and stabilizes her personality through positive, corrective relationships with friends who become her family. 

When she becomes too powerful, the Emperor feels threatened, and he exiles her on a mission “to find other cultures” in a special submarine no one believes will work.

But the submarine does work well enough to bring her to the surface in New York Harbor. She lives on the streets of New York City while she develops a complicated dependency on a black hat hacker. This creates a love triangle between the two of them and the Emperor’s son-turned-rock-star who was exiled for following his passion for music into disobedient territory.

After a confrontation with the CIA, White Sand takes what she learned from the surface back with her to Atlantis. And with the help of her severely mentally ill, genius father, she works to overthrow the complacent emperor. 

I experimented with many different creative writing techniques in the creation of this series, and each book has its own unique flavor. I believe that my eventual diagnosis with the same type of mental illness my father had gives me a compassion for Sandi’s (White Sand’s) father in book five that wasn’t there when I started off in book one. After having gone through psychosis myself, I realize that it would have been impossible for me to simply imagine what he was going through. I had to experience it to know. In that sense, my schizoaffective disorder has been a blessing.

Satyr Plays

I had always debated whether the characters of Lost Atlantis are supposed to be dramatic or comedic. The pain which led me to escape my waking life into these characters often seemed to transcend seriousness into an absurd, insane plane of existence. And there was a wonderful lightness in my heart after completing this series. So I created a spin-off series of the Lost Atlantis characters’ time in New York City, written as a comedy: Satyr Plays. 

Satyr Plays is an ongoing series of comedic short stories that takes the characters of Lost Atlantis and puts them in silly situations lasting about 10-minutes per story. The stories are written in sitcom style, with jokes in the style of late night television. 

Matt, Sandi, and Shem have all arrived in New York Harbor in a submarine from Atlantis. When the submarine sinks, there’s no going back. Shem is presumed dead, and after a rocky start, the two leftover 20-somethings take up residence in a Bitcoin-subsidized apartment in NYC. 

Meet the cast: 

Matt–a focused, hard-working black hat hacker who fills his free time with various substances and shallow, transactional sexual relationships. 

Sandi–a job-hopping dilettante with an unending stream of ideas for side hustles and career overhauls. 

Shem–a pop star with amnesia about his previous life in Atlantis, obsessed with making music, with absolutely nothing else on his mind. (Shem was discovered and adopted by a band in England who spotted him fighting for his life in the open ocean.)

Matt, Sandi, and Shem are all bound together by their Atlantean heritage. 

Matt daydreams about settling down with Sandi. Sandi aches for Shem. And does Shem secretly have a thing for his band manager? 

Satyr Plays takes the most fun, light-hearted setting and circumstances of the Lost Atlantis series and imagines a whole new set of joyous possibilities with these friendships. 

Join the gang as they get in trouble on the internet, think up get-rich quick schemes, tour the world as a band, and try to prevent each other from achieving sexual satisfaction. 

(And for those who wouldn’t want to read a sitcom, there’s an audiobook performance too!)

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