A FANTASY LIFE

I'm reading, mostly with my eyes shut – I do love audio books. So far this year I've gone back and listened again to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Dresden Files, The Walking Dead, and am now on the fourth book in The Game of Thrones. It's hard to explain why I keep returning to all these, but it's probably because there are so many characters and stories to love...I must be a saga-gal! I easily fall upon series, including TV versions, and often re-read True Blood and watch the dramas re-envisioned where killed-off characters live again. I love the differences.

My reading taste changed because I wanted to write fantasy so began reading lots of it...and then I found audio versions of Asimov's Foundation series, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth and oh the feeling when the right voice reads life into those characters is beyond fascination...it's a drug, and I became addicted so now am obsessed with listening to books, so much so that I hardly ever switch on the TV. It goes on for me to watch one thing and off again. I can't watch normal programmes, only drama. I don't live in the real world.

It doesn't matter that I'm not in the real world and I'll be gone from it soon enough I suppose, so why should I spend my last years trying to interpret the reported news and politics? I enjoy every minute I spend alone in my cave; I love the flashes of time with my many grandchildren; and I refuse to become a Moaning Minnie like the old woman I meet on a Monday morning at the bus stop on my way into work – if that's how the world bends us then I'm opting out. I can easily deal with the tension created on pages of text because I can turn the page to find out who did what when and where and to whom...and more than likely the why of it too...and yes, I believe in fairies.

Have I written my fantasy yet? No. Gestation is a bitch, but something is creeping out now and after years of working with Tarot cards I'm splashing some of it all over my pages. So there's a short story almost finished that will appear in an anthology, and some kind of magic has appeared in poems, some of which have been published. I started working on world-building a few years ago so that is always in the back of my mind when creating characters..and there are more than a few novels lazing around waiting for my attention. I'm drowning in fantasy...see the bubbles coming up?