Would that I had wings
Charles DeLint makes me want to write. He makes me want to really truly write, though I know that I wouldn't be able to. Instead I'd write Charles DeLint sounding squaking much like I used to regurgitate Laurell K. Hamilton sounding mush, back in the day. I'd steal the sentences, the jargon, the feel, everything I could because that's what made me want to write. That the story was over and I wasn't ready for it to be over. I wanted to still be there, so I continued it. I wasn't writing it for anyone other than myself - to continue my blatant escapism with my own talent for knicking words and sentence structures and making a story out of it. A stolen one, but one that served its purpose nonetheless. An author interviewee on NPR not that long ago, who's name I don't recall, said something about how when you start writing you cheat and borrow and steal and then eventually you grow into yourself, your own words. Only I never did - instead, my words curled up in the soft earth inside my head and died. ...I haven't had the urge to write like this in a long long time. And I still can't even though I want to. Even though the urge is there. I decided once, when I sat before a blank screen of a word processor with the little cursor flickering at me, that I couldn't write anymore because I couldn't give that much of myself away anymore. I had been a young and innocent thief when I set down pages upon pages of childish fantasy. I'm not that anymore and I don't have stories I can tell. I have stories, alright, but they are dry and dusty and dull, and locked behind thick oaken doors in a library below the ground, somewhere in my head or heart or soul. And I feel like a right jackass, too, because I'm fairly certain two of the books I've burned in my lifetime were by Charles DeLint. And if I had ever known his writing would do this to me - although, to be fair, I'm certain I tried to read them both more than once and failed - well. I think I'd have held onto them. Even though his writing lays me so bare I almost want to burn Someplace to be Flying right along with them.