Writing keeps me sane.
I’ve been saying that for years. I’ve been saying it for years because it’s true. On days when I produce no words, edit no words, format no words, I end that day filled with anxiety and dread. I experience those feelings every day, but when I don’t write, I have nothing to keep me afloat. Hence, I drown in the waves of overwhelming fear, the undertow of sheared nerves pulls me into its embrace, and I become a less attractive, more-depressed-than-manic Harley Quinn.
I need to write. I cannot not write. It determines my mood and predicts every move I make from sunrise to sunrise. My life centers around my characters and their ups and downs. I talk to them. I mean, I literally talk to them. Especially late at night. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t live alone. How would I get by without my daily discussions with my favorite characters?
With Lisen of Solsta, it was Korin. For anyone who’s read the books, that should come as no surprise. He and I would play act final scenes which would then inform many of the earlier scenes. Now that I’ve left Lisen and Korin behind, I’ve turned to discussions of what-happens-next with Mari, my new hero. For some reason play acting didn’t work with her, so we sit on the edge of the bed together, in the dark, discussing where to go from here or what happens later in the next book in the series.
This is what writing is for me, a life lived in part in another world. Even if I weren’t writing fantasy, I’d spend an hour or two or three a day at the very least in whatever place and time I had set the current story. And going through life that way, with one foot in Southern California of 2019 and the other in an alternate dimension linked to earth via a sacred grove in a forsaken forest, keeps me sane.
Note: I want to thank Jan Maher for my most viewed blog yet. Her responses to my questions in that first interview sparked a lot of interest. And thank you, all of you, wherever you are, for visiting my site.