Wayward Writer

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good
madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks
you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or
build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the
next year, you surprise yourself.
~ Neil Gaiman

Magic is reading and writing and that amazing sensation when you get sucked into a novel or fic, sitting spellbound as you dive into imaginary worlds that sometimes seem to you as being more real than your own world. Magic is sitting with pen and paper or in front of the computer and watching as the ideas, daydreams, and specters of imagination solidify and become nearly tangible as they flow from your brain onto paper/word processor. It’s watching a character develop from a brief fragment of your mind into a living, almost breathing person, independent, with concrete personalities of their own. It’s watching the story develop and being swept away right alongside your characters, it’s surprising even yourself with the plot twists and turns. It’s Magic, life encapsulated in a dream bubble, or indeed as the title states, “Good Madness.”

To be a writer, to really be one is to be wildly, passionately, fabulously off-kilter in some way. I mean after all our classification in the DM IV should read: Evil and Sadistic Paranoid Neurotic Schitzophrenic Masochist…aka Writer. How else would the cliffhanger and other such beloved plot devices have to light?

Another less creepy, more poetic way to look at it would be to say that Authors/Writers channel life, hopes, dreams, wishes, nightmares even, but most of all, they channel life. Pure and Simple (no matter what Mr. Wilde might say).