Imagination is My Reality

For as long as I can remember I’ve told stories, fantastic tales of lands unknown. Before I could write for myself, I told them to my dolls and stuffed animals, especially a yellow and gold dragon, I so creatively named Firebreather. Like all children I hated chores, but when my focus was right or I had enough incentive, either to avoid getting in trouble or get an allowance, I happily raked leaves, vacuumed, and cleaned telling myself stories of princesses rescued and their white knights.

While there may have been scribbled stories before this one, the first I remember writing was on the special paper they gave to young kids with inch wide writing spaces and a place for an illustration. Written with a #2 pencil and illustrated in crude crayon drawings, it was what I would now call a portal adventure. It took place at my elementary school where my third-grade teacher, Mr. Heartly, had fallen into a deep hole under a school bush. In falling through this hole, he found himself transported to the magical land of Einhorne, with no way to return. The events themselves are blurry now almost thirty years later and all my schoolwork long gone through many moves, but somehow my classmates and myself found the hole and went to rescue him, returning safely on the backs of giant birds, Pegasus’s, and dragons. I know that I wrote it when I’d had a bad day, when other kids were cruel, because let’s face it I was a weird kid and I’m a weirder adult. While adult bullying is much more subtle it still happens. I escaped then, as I sometimes do now, into my fantasy worlds. The places where I was in charge and could do anything, be anything. The places where I could be the hero and feel loved. Not that I didn’t have a wonderful family mind you, I simply had a hard time connecting with them. My mother was always and probably will always be my biggest fan. She still shows off my work as she did then, but it’s not easy to hang a three-hundred-page manuscript on a fridge.

I still write in an escapist way, but my characters are fully fleshed out people, perhaps occasionally based on myself and friends, but rarely in the first person anymore. The stories I write these days, would fill hundreds of cardboard boxes, if they were stowed as my childhood works once were. I still prefer to write longhand before typing out my work, there is something in the physical act of pencil on paper and a stack of notebooks that is a thousand times more therapeutic and satisfying than typing on the stark blankness of a computer word document. In my vast cupboard of unfinished or simply unpublished works are stories of coming of age, escaping abuse, and saving the world or at least the people that make up the main character’s emotional world. They say you grow out of imaginary friends, I didn’t, they simply grew up too and shed their furry forms, or became anthropomorphic, becoming people with distinct personalities and even their own advice to offer, living in the wild and untamed wilderness or sprawling gothic cities that exists only inside my head.

Sadly, most of my work is much darker than it was then, incorporating the things that I’ve seen and been involved in. It knows now that the world is not necessarily kind and things don’t always work the way you want them to, though things work themselves out in the end as long as you keep breathing. As a way of encouragement, for myself and others, my stories almost always have happy endings. I have trouble hurting characters I really like even if that’s how the story was supposed to go, because many of the characters I use are the same ones from whom I seek counsel in my dark hours, when I don’t have the social battery to seek my friends and my personal white knight must be away. Many of my works remain unfinished because of how real their personalities are in those moments and knowing that whatever plot point I had planned isn’t really in that character’s bag of tricks or, if it is, that they simply wouldn’t do it.