Moonbeam Cafe: for the night owls. We are not afraid of the dark. Pour a drink and stay a while.
Magicienne Fatale

This image is a present to @Eilis :)
(BTW Elly, I have this oddball theory that your literature is split between magical (poetry) & deductive (novel) mindsets. Would resolving this split result in short stories!?)
Magicians are usually very imaginative and creative people (for accounts of the role of fiction in creating imaginative otherworlds see [...]). A good example is Jane, a feminist witch, who describes her childhood experiences during the early 1950s:
As a child I lived in two worlds – ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’. This was conscious from the age of six or seven years old. I can remember being taken to a performance of the ‘Nutcracker Suite’ ballet. I was totally enchanted by the images, particularly the ‘snowflakes’. I took these images home and lay in bed in the dark, watching them again and again. Eventually I became totally absorbed into them, and they took on a life of their own. I became a little human ‘hoover’, absorbing images from anywhere, including stories from comics and books, and took them over to the ‘other side’ where they became lived experience, and took on their own life. Similarly, if I had a particularly vivid and interesting dream, I learnt to go back into it, and it would take on a life of its own.



Sounds a bit like me! I was constantly imagining in my head, and absolutely anything could be taken and absorbed and kneaded and folded into a story!
maybe I should be a witch
I actually very much dislike writing short stories. I almost cannot. No, I cannot. Every short story is either a long poem or a chapter of a novel.
I wonder if it has something to do with what you say!
I've been told I'm a novelist with a poetic obsession with language...
Thank you for this post! I feel so special getting a post as a present!
:) :) :)
Yeah, I wondered about this since your novels are often about detectives... who after all deduce things. I wondered if grad school had something to do with this... Since your thesis novel was a dystopian scifi detective novel, I wondered if it reflected a grad school program that was "technical" & rigid.
Oh, not at all. I actually enjoy detective stories and after fighting with the program's desires and finding it didn't work for me, I was like "hell with it, I'll do something I find FUN" and that's how the detective aspect got put in ;)
I am interested in magic as a sometimes fantasy writer, but I dislike the "wave a wand" or "insta-lightning" approach for serious works. So usually, my 'magic' present is really subtle - things like mind sway or magnetic personality are magic elements that are present in biology in the book. No wands or words. Those can be fun in their own way, but they don't fit well with my style.