The Mirror Reflects On Itself

There's a man, in a tower, in a room;

I might as well admit that I fit the stereotype. When I was a kid, speculative fiction - mostly science fiction and fantasy - taught me a lot.

It wasn't science or maths. I had some gifted and enthusiastic teachers who tried their best, and despite the resilience of my youthful brain to new information, some of it stuck. It wasn't enough to make me some kind of STEM savant, but it got me a good enough grounding that the concepts expressed in fiction brought little of practical use to the table.

And he's in the room all of the day -

It wasn't really ethics or morality either. A lot of modern literature is just reskinned fables, but the morality tales that I read didn't show me something new, not really. They discussed the stakes of making good or bad choices, but what those choices were never really changed much.

Be kind or be cruel. Be humane or inhuman. The 'bad guys' usually lost. Sometimes the good guys lost at the same time.

And in all of the room is a mirror;

But as a timid child, what I learned from the books was a sense of adventure. The day was sometimes won by the brave, the bright, the bold - and usually by the kind - but it was most often won by the people who did things. Move forward - look back when you have to - but when faced with injustice, inhumanity, and the intolerable, you only win if you do something.

Heady stuff for someone still in single digits, age-wise. I like to think it still hasn't left me. Not even when 'don't do anything' is easier. And it was well-spun stories that told me that, again, and again. The ones that didn't tended to leave one...

Unsatisfied.

But the mirror has nothing to say.

Finding these books - and later, roleplaying games - brought me into contact with people who were like me. Bookish, nebbish, maybe a little extra-introverted. But people who dreamed of heroes, wanted to be them - wanted to inspire them.

But telling stories is hard.

There's always someone at a dinner party, I would come to learn, who invariably says "I could write a book", if you introduce yourself as a writer. Probably. I could eat a city bus - but that bite-at-a-time stuff is hard on the jaws.

And of all of the things in the room,

All of this is to say that my childhood was dotted with telling stories for my friends, and for people that I cared about. Stories that were important to me - and helping them tell stories that were important to them.

Everyone has different strengths in storytelling. Me, I love puzzles, riddles, the metaphor made bare and given soul in rhyme and mystery. Bilbo and Gollum, riddling in the dark. The Riddler, in various Batman media. Hell, the Bridgekeeper in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Whether ornaments, books on the shelf;

And that's what I love to share. That frisson of chill, the strange aesthetics, the oddly lilting verse that sinks into the consciousness. The poems and riddles and prophecies and metaphors that free the mind from the literal and lets it fully escape into a world where the right person, in the right place, at the right time, can save or damn everything.

It's what I want to share.

It's something I love to do, and I'm good at it. I'd love to give people the kind of content - the riddles, the puzzles, the verse - that makes for a 'wow' moment, in their stories and their adventures, and provide the tools to create it for themselves.

Yes of all of these things, and the man,

Andrew Fletcher said "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I do not care who writes its laws."

Cynic! In my heart of hearts, I would do him one better; I would have each person find the songs or the verse in their own hearts, or the ones that so move them.

Let them find the stories of heroes. Let them write stories where they can be those heroes, or make them.

Let me teach them to find the twisting metaphors and ominous verse, the strange quests and noble sacrifices that they want to sing of. The laws will be all the better for it.

Why, the mirror reflects on itself.