For the past few days, I've avoided doing anything involving writing.  I couldn't really say why; I just didn't feel like it is the best excuse I can come up with.

While driving to EarthFare this afternoon, and listening to Kerli, I became more certain of my direction than ever.

When I was a child, I created vast, strange fantasy worlds that I know no one else understood.  Most kids have one or two imaginary friends, at most; I had an entire imaginary fleet.  

When I started getting stressed out during my long stint overseas, I would write on that same imaginary world.  Sometimes I'd throw people I knew in for fun.  I wrote and wrote and wrote...would spend hours upon hours writing sometimes!  Length-wise, I wrote a novel!  Granted, not any sort of publishable novel, but a novel just the same.

During my third year in China, I became both so stressed out in the real world, and so wrapped up in my fictional one, that a strange thing started happening:  I started "seeing" the unreal as real.  

Not in the sense of delusions, mind you.  Not in that sense at all.  I WISH it was delusions!  It would be much less scary.  No; I mean in the sense that I was constantly running into very real situations and even people that resembled fictional ones I had already created a wee bit too strongly.

Of course, there's reasons for this.  I think part of it was spiritual, for a terribly realistic reason that I won't get into here.  

Point in me telling this story now is that, after that experience and it's climax, I stopped writing.  I had even stopped sketching.  Essentially, I stopped creating.  

Between not creating anything, and grieving the loss of a loved one, I felt I had essentially given up.  It wasn't until quite recently that my inspiration has returned, but I have to admit...I'm a little scared.  I'm scared of getting too wrapped-up in it again, of not being able to tell fiction from reality.

I'm afraid of what that level of intensity could mean, if it *does* happen again.  

But, my characters demand for their story to be told.  They insist on being heard.  

It's exhausting sometimes, trying to listen to them.  They're very loud, and like to talk over each other.  Yet they are as close to me as my best friend, as real to me as my husband at times.  As essential to me as family.  

So, here's to trying to pull together a few coherent stories or novels, so that their voices may be heard.  Here is to creativity, and our creations meaning more to us than we ever imagined possible.

~L. A. Howard~