w o r d s

w a n d e r

Remembering, forgetting, amnesia, secrets, lies, truths, goals, hopes, dreams, nightmares. 

Time and place, coming and going, drifting away.

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When I was little, I would walk to the wide windows of my bedroom and survey the land beyond; I gazed across the treetops and field and imagined that I was a princess in a tower, on the verge of adventure. 

As children, the capacity to manipulate existence with the mind is magic. Eventually, the world, it's rules and expectations fade those abilities away...but maybe it would be better if we  still allowed ourselves to detach from reality. 

w o r d s

w o r d s

When I was about 13, I fell in LOVE with a book by Eve Forward called Villians by Necessity, which my grandmother had bought for me at an everything for a dollar, going-out-of-business book sale. It was a fantastic tale of good and evil, light and dark, magic and criminals; the main characters were an assassin, a thief, a druid and a twisted lady-vampire. I literally carried it with me everywhere for a long, long time, drew on all the pages, marked off all of my favourite parts, lent it to my friends (aka, insisted that they also read it) and memorized passages (which I still remember). I also drew some pretty terrible fan art.

This book inspired me to create my first character, a blonde, blue-eyed assassin named Nick Macabre--except that, because I was 13, I pronounced it Maca-bray and thought it sounded like some kind of bony stingray. I went through a serious assassin phase after that (what is that?); I even asked the same grandmother who had bought me the book to sew me a black cloak for Halloween (and I felt excellent skulking around the darkness wearing it and Doc Martens--I suppose it's no wonder that I later also went through pseudo goth phase).

In reality, I'm a BIG believer in non-violence (and always have been), but there was something so terribly romantic about a thoughtful, articulate man, well educated in the ways of weapons and poisons and snuffing corrupt political figures. I guess that was just my teenage bad-boy phase; instead of crushing on punks in leather, I was into medieval anti-heroes.

w o r d s

Words words words. I love beautiful language, when words are carefully
selected and vivid and delectable.

For me, certain words evoke very specific mental images. For example: