The first book in Bonnie Dillabough’s Dimensional Alliance series, and the book with which she became a novelist at sixty-three. A tribute and a review.
Every series has a first door. For The Dimensional Alliance it’s a literal one. An impossible door in a strange little house on Infinity Loop, opened by a key that fits nothing in the ordinary world. The House on Infinity Loop is where Bonnie Dillabough’s whole multiverse begins, and it’s where Bonnie herself began as a novelist, publishing this first book two weeks before her sixty-fourth birthday. Both beginnings are worth honoring.
The setup is pure invitation. A young woman named Jenny inherits the house from her aunt, and with it a cat who’s not quite a cat and a tiny key on a gold chain. The key opens a door that shouldn’t exist. Jenny steps out of the workaday world and into the realms of the multiverse. There she finds, as the best portal stories arrange it, that the fate of everything she loves now rests in her hands.
Portal stories are some of my favorite kinds of stories, and I think it’s because they make a promise every reader wants kept: there’s more to the world than the ordinary rooms we live in. Bonnie kept that promise with real warmth, and I smile whenever I think about how much joy she put into keeping it.
A doorway, in fiction and in life
It’s hard to read this opening without thinking of how it came to exist.
Bonnie had carried a recurring dream since she was sixteen, a story waiting decades for her to write it. She finally crossed her own impossible threshold late in life. She sat down for a NaNoWriMo challenge, and wrote seventy-eight thousand words in a month. The book that resulted is this one.
The parallel is almost too neat. A story about an ordinary person discovering a door has been waiting for her all along, written by a woman who discovered the same thing about herself at sixty-three.
This parallel moves me. So many people carry a story around for decades and tell themselves it’s too late, and too many of them believe it. Bonnie is the proof that the door stays open.
In memory
A tribute to Bonnie Dillabough: the friend, mentor, and author behind The Dimensional Alliance, in her own story and mine.
What does The House on Infinity Loop set in motion?
As a series opener, The House on Infinity Loop does the foundational work of establishing Jenny, the house, the key, the cat, and the multiverse beyond the door, the architecture every later book builds on. The tone Bonnie set here would carry through all eight volumes: sincere instead of cynical, warm instead of grim, built on the conviction that an unremarkable person can rise to meet a destiny she never saw coming. It’s a kind, hopeful kind of science fiction and fantasy, and that kindness was Bonnie on the page.
That sincerity is what I treasure in her work. Cynicism is easy, it sells itself as sophistication, and a lot of modern fantasy wears it like a costume. Bonnie didn’t bother with the costume. She wrote hope straight, and I think that takes more courage.
Keep reading
It’s never too late to write the book inside you: Bonnie published her first novel at sixty-three. Proof that the door is always still there.
How the book came to be
The origin story is worth telling because it’s as improbable as anything in the novel. Bonnie had spent a lifetime writing other things, songs, poetry, church plays, marketing copy, decades of work online and in broadcast television, but she’d never called herself an author. The dream of this book had lived in her since she was sixteen and stayed unwritten for nearly fifty years. What finally moved her was an interview she worked up the courage to request with Mercedes Lackey, one of her own heroes.
When Bonnie admitted she’d always wanted to write a novel, Lackey gave her the plainest possible advice: put your butt in the chair and write. Bonnie took a NaNoWriMo challenge, wrote seventy-eight thousand words in a month, finished the manuscript on New Year’s Day, and published it that spring. The House on Infinity Loop is the book that fifty-year wait produced.
Lackey’s advice is the best writing advice I know, and people hate hearing it because there’s no trick hidden inside it. Bonnie took it at sixty-three and wrote seventy-eight thousand words in a month, and that ought to retire the I don’t have time excuse for good.
I had the privilege of nudging her toward that keyboard, and watching her step through her own impossible door and build an entire universe on the far side of it remains among the most rewarding things I’ve witnessed in this work. This first book is where it all started. Read this book for the story, and then think about the woman who waited nearly fifty years to write it. If that doesn’t push you back toward your own unfinished manuscript, I’m not sure anything will.
