Fantasy is a lens which sharpens and clarifies the sliver of reality viewed through it; magic is one of the tools used to accomplish this. It’s a powerful tool and often it is a threatening one, because there is the propensity to react against something that affects you deeply.

Sufficiently advanced magic takes on a reality all of its own and begins to be something believed in on its own terms, with something approaching religious faith. This is possibly the reason why more fundamental Christians feel so violently threatened by such things as the magic in Harry Potter; they confuse a powerful system of magic being used to shape a fictional story and certain aspects of the reality in which it is based with a potential rival to their own creed and dogma and set of beliefs.

Thus magic gets a reputation because it’s batting against an already established system which is entrenched, and very much opposed to the things that the new fantasy might be bringing in with it. If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur Clarke said, then it is also possible that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a religion.

If anything that is beyond our comprehension or ability to explain away by empirical means may be tagged with the word ‘magic,’ then the Christian mythos starts to drip with the thing – what are miracles if not magic? Changing water into wine? Walking on water? Resurrection, for that matter…? But over the course of two thousand years the magic has hardened into a cracked outer shell of dogma. It is no longer the original magic but the recasting of that magic into something useful and controllable by a series of human interpreters to support their own thesis and grip on power.

There is real magic in belief. Sometimes wishing for something hard enough makes it come true because the sheer power of the act of visualization means that you are working for the manifestation of that thing in your life.

Richard Bach’s “Illusions: the adventures of a reluctant Messiah” encapsulates this precisely. Specifically, I am thinking about the blue feather incident, where the reluctant Messiah of the title instructs our POV character, his equally reluctant disciple, on the principles of visualization. Visualize something, the Messiah says, and it will manifest in your life. All right, says the disciple, a blue feather. The Messiah raises an eyebrow but goes, okay, blue feather. CONCENTRATE on it.

Next thing, they’re passing a dairy delivery truck and our disciple’s eyes go wide. Hey, LOOK, he says, and sure enough, on the side of the truck it says BLUE FEATHER DAIRIES.

This is where it gets interesting.

The disciple says that he expected a “real” blue feather. Yes, says the Messiah, but how did you visualize this when you invited it into your life? Were you holding it in your hand or was it just, like, floating disembodied in space?… Floating, the disciple admits. Well, the Messiah explains, that accounts for it. You didn’t personalize the magic and all you did was manifest a generic iteration of the item that you were seeking, not the thing itself in your possession.

Oooooh. It’s MAGIC. It’s real magic because this is delivered utterly matter-of-factly, as though it were common knowledge, as though anybody could do it.

But this is where the organized and dogmatic faith departs from the pure unfettered faith of a child not yet trained to obey all the rules. The original miracles are crusted over by the barnacles of creed, words that are repeated verbatim every Sunday to the point of becoming invisible, and completely detached from the things that they may actually mean.

Are the “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” just representations of the things they purport to be or are they MAGICALLY — and I use the word advisedly — transformed into the real thing when the priest intones the w

Just the other day an editor I like and respect – and have sold several stories to – wrote this on her blog:

“Some good stories but not good enough to send up the line. Most stories start too slow to catch my eye… if I’ve past the first or second page, I think, ‘This would’ve been a great story if it started here.’ In other words, get to the point already.”

And I know what she means. I do. I do, really. Yes, a story should have a point. Tales that meander all over the place – tales that go no further than internal angsting of the characters – tales that basically consist of a beautifully described setting – aren’t engaging.

I christened them ‘New Yorker stories.’ Every time I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of New Yorker ‘literary’ fiction I’ve kind of found myself swimming with these myopic literary sharks, taking random bites out of anything because they can’t seem to focus hard enough or long enough to actually be dangerous. I’ve read stories labeled as ‘literary’ that were deeply brilliant. But on the whole, I do prefer my stories to be going somewhere, and taking me there with them. A point is essential; a story has to have something to TELL me, and something within it to change the characters who inhabit it to the point that I can tell that this has actually happened.

But in one sense the editor conflates ‘slow’ and ‘badly paced and starting in the wrong place’ – and I have to take a step back here, and speak up in defense of ‘slow.’

Starting in the wrong place is most often a beginner’s mistake. You kind of wander into your story through a side door and poke around the place for a bit until you find yourself comfortable enough to get on with telling the tale which you meant to tell all along.

But this is a fairly specific problem, and ‘starting in the wrong place’ is not the same as ‘slow’ – because slow can be beautiful, and a story that is all point and nothing else is just as awkward and uncomfortable as one that has no point at all.

Slow is depth. Slow is taking the time to know your tale. You take your story out and ply it with wine and roses by candlelight, you don’t slam it against the wall in a back alley and have your wicked way with it without first asking its name. Slow is waking to a perfect tropical day in a beach resort, wandering out to the verandah and stretching languorously as you watch the sun glitter on perfect pale-blue waters… and then remembering that you came here with the love of your life, that he wasn’t in bed when you woke this morning, and that he said that he might be wanting an early morning swim before breakfast, and that you’ve just caught a glimpse of something thrust under your door and half under the rug, a note from resort management which, when you pick it up, warns you that a hungry shark has been seen close to shore and that you should not go into the water until the problem has been sorted out. Cue ominous music.

But without that slow – without that first glimpse of paradise – the point of the shark is kind of lost. Unh, yeah, sure, there’s a predator in the water. But far more importantly than that, there’s a PREDATOR in PARADISE – and without the slow, without the establishing shot that gives you that paradise to begin with, all you’re left with is the monster.

Think of all those horrible B-movie slasher films with bucketloads of fake blood and monsters killing for no particular rhyme or reason. There is no ‘slow’ there. No subtle. Nothing but the fake blood and the teenage scream queen who’s about to become hamburger. Now think of some of the more subtle Stephen King efforts, where you are lulled by slow, where the small and pretty and innocent and innocuous Maine towns which King loves to set his stories in hide some ghastly horror beyond imagining – made

One of the things that I had simply never factored into the equation when I started publishing books… was people writing to me, from here there and everywhere, people whose only connection to me was the story that I had written, and they had read.

A note that was at once disconcerting and massively ego-boosting came from a reader of one my foreign editions, who told me that after reading “Jin Shei” she had put me squarely at the top of her Favorite Authors list, supplanting the current crown-holder. Who was… Ken Follett. You know, the guy who wrote “Pillars of the Earth”. THAT Ken Follett. I mean, wow. This would take some living up to.

Someone I had met personally, very briefly, who had been encouraged to purchase “The Secrets of Jin Shei” by a mutual friend, wrote, Damn you. Damn you! I didn’t sleep but 5 hours last night, because I could not stop reading Jin-Shei. (I can think of few sweeter reasons for damnation. I was grinning for days…)

Another friend phoned me from Florida at 3 AM to scream at me across the continent, “You KILLED HER! How could you kill her?!” when a favorite character met an apparently premature (according to her) demise.

Somebody else wrote on a blog somewhere, “And as for Lihui, I wanted to choke him until those gorgeous eyes of his popped right out!” (Any time I can get that response with a fictional character, well, my work here is done, as it were…)

And then there’s the utterly un-obvious demographic – all of the above comments were from women readers who might have been expected to enjoy this sort of a book, but on the heels of all that came a note I sincerely treasure, from a male reader writing in an obviously African American voice, who told me that he was moved to tears by certain parts of the book (but that I should definitely not tell his homies this). He also said he would tell all his friends about it. Somewhere I had a devoted circle of readers to whom I had never thought my story would reach out – and this is the kind of moment we writers live for, the knowledge that the readers are out there, and that some of them care this much.

But one of my favorite stories about my stories had to be the guy who wrote to me to tell me about the time he was taking out the trash at his condo when he happened to notice a stack of books that somebody had left – obviously discards, but left by the trash chute rather than tossed down it, for anyone potentially interested. Most of them were various incarnations of ageing reference books – but one, a new and apparently unread paperback novel… was my “Hidden Queen”. (By this stage I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry…) In any event, he decided to pick up the novel and keep it around for something to read, you know, if he got bored and stuck without anything better to do. Two days after this, he continues, he picked up the book and read the first couple of paragraphs, figured it was lightweight “airport reading” type material, put it down again… picked it up three or four days after that… and didn’t lay it down again until he was done, five days later. He put down “Hidden Queen”, went straight out to buy “Changer of Days” (the sequel), and devoured that 24 hours later.

He described the original discovery of “The Hidden Queen”… as “a very nice accident”. Whoever originally bought the book did not find it remotely worth keeping – or, apparently, even reading – but somehow stories will find a way. They grow through cracks in concrete, like wild flowers, and they’ll catch the right eye.

Oh, there’s more where all of this came from. Lots more. I have a particular attachment to the letters I’ve received from kids, both older teens and some as young as eleven, who had read my YA stuff and had to write and tell me about it. I would l

I am a book collector. My husband is another one.

When we got married, he already had a considerable collection of books; and when we moved from Florida to Washington state fully two thirds of our moving boxes were stuffed with books, probably 1,500 of them. In Washington, my own moving boxes arrived from New Zealand. Thirty book boxes out of some fifty contained books– another 1,500 or so.

We have now been together for a decade. In those ten years, we have not ceased to gather up books. We have a library off the office, an entire room filled with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three of the four walls. One wall sports a sliding secret door that, when closed, hides the library. From the office side, the door is, of course, disguised as a bookcase.

A floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the office is stuffed with enough reference material – on things as diverse as a dictionary of poisons and antidotes, histories of medieval women, a manual on screenplay writing and a Chinese-English dictionary – to make it groan under the weight.

Another room has built-in shelves most of which are triple-stacked with paperbacks, and that room has other shelves where larger hardcovers roost. There’s a book case in the bedroom downstairs. There’s a book case in the second bedroom upstairs – a double one, from floor to ceiling. We built in another shelf into a wall in the corridor. There’s a shelf of large coffee-table books (on Antarctica, on China, on bonsai, on castles in Scotland and trees in South Africa…) tucked under what in normal houses would be a breakfast counter off of our open-plan kitchen.

There are books stacked on the piano, next to my armchair in the living room, which I am currently reading. There are books stacked next to my husband’s armchair. There are piles on the coffee table. There are random books scattered on the dining room table, next to my bed, in the car.

You will have done the math already and figured out a simple truth: we have not lived so long, even combining our lifetimes, to have read every book in this house. There are unread books on our shelves.

They are not abandoned. British writer Nick Hornby said, “With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.” Recently I came across another essay on the subject, Kirsty Logan’s “Confined by Pages: the Joy of Unread Books.” Kirsty says, “An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book­any unread book­could change your life.”

Because, she says, having an unexplored world right at your fingertips is a totally exhilarating idea. It’s ALL THERE, still waiting for you, still unread. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there, and every one of the books on your shelves is part of you, of who you are, of who you were, of who you are becoming.

There is a very good reason I gravitate to the bookshelves of every new house I step into. Those books will tell me more about the inhabitants of that house in five minutes of browsing than in twenty four hours of intense conversation.

Anyone coming into our house would no doubt be similarly enlightened about us. Who am I? What am I interested in? What are my husband’s interests? Where do we meet and converge, and where do we each go our own way? Which one of is interested in ancient mysteries and crop circles, and which one in the histories of Byzantium and the Crusades?

Yes, there are books in this house which haven’t been read. We LIKE it that way. We will never be caught in the unthinkable situation of having “nothing to do”. All we ever have to do to keep from feeling bored and at a loose end, even for just an instant, is walk to a bookshelf and run our fingers across the spines of the books that live there, and choosing one we have not yet been introduced to, and settling in to become

Dear Lynne Reid Banks,

I have always written. Always. I’ve made up stories since I knew what making up stories meant.

I’ve scribbled them down in countless notebooks over the years, in longhand, in pen or pencil, and then after I’d crossed the great computer divide, directly into the hard drive of at least five computers so far in my lifetime. My passion for this, my vocation, has outlasted many a tool used in the creation of the things I do.

By the time you came to my school to talk to my class, I was fifteen years old. I was a stellar scholar in most spheres (well, let’s not talk too closely about math) and particularly in language – and yes, I was writing. But things were fairly nebulous at this point when it came to that vast country known as “the rest of my life” and what I would do when I got there.

I knew, of course, that books were written by actual people – but I do believe that you were amongst the first, if not the very first, person who was an actual working writer whom I had ever laid eyes on. And you came to talk to us about your life.

I still remember that day, when you came to speak – we were in the wood-paneled old library with serried ranks of books surrounding us (how appropriate was that) and you stood in front of us, and you told it it all. You told us of the dramas. You told it all.

You spoke about the highs, and the purest joy when something turns out so right — often almost by accident — but still, your doing, your touch. You told us about the purest happiness of having a reader, particularly a young reader, come up to you and tell you in an eager rush how much your book has meant to them, about the reader who comes up and confides that one of your characters is her new best friend, about the reader who rails at you if you hurt a character he likes. About the people who follow you into your worlds, and make a home for themselves there. About the people who believe in what you did, in what you are doing, and about the way it gives you wings and lets you soar high above the world in joyous flight.

You also told us about the waiting, about the blood and sweat and tears that went into the making of a book, about the rivers of red ink that go into the editorial process, about the pain of change, about writer’s block, about people who don’t understand your intentions or your prose and who can be bitterly unkind, about the frustrations, and the failures, and the pain of it all when it goes wrong. But even when you spoke of these things, you spoke with the light of angels in your eyes, the light that told eloquently of your love for your work, for your craft, for your art – that told eloquently of the simple fact that you could not, would not, EVER do anything else with your life.

This was the moment when my fifteen-year-old self sat up and began to pay attention.

I had written all of my life. But this was the moment that I knew without any doubt whatsoever that what I wanted to be was a WRITER. Here was a signpost, clear and unequivocal, into that deep country of the rest of my life. This is what I wanted to do This is who I wanted to be. This was the light I wanted to come into me, just like it had filled you.

THIS, I told myself, sitting up straight and clutching the arms of my chair, staring at you as though you were a living epiphany, which is precisely what you were. I WANT THIS. I WANT THIS LIFE.

I do school visits myself these days, and every time I face a class of bright-eyed youngsters I think of you, and of what you have done for me. And I hope that one, just one, of those kids watching me talk about my own life and work is sitting up straight, and staring at me with a heart that is suddenly beating harder, and thinking that they have found their dream. I can only hope that the strength and the power of my own vision are as vivid and beautiful and inspiring as yours once was.

I’ve never written you a letter to tell you a

As a guest blogger on the blog [Myth, the Universe, and Everything] of writer Alana Joli Abbott, I recently discussed the mythworld:

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There is a certain line of descent when it comes to things literary. A regression would take us from the contemporary world through history – and, from there into folktale, then into legend, then into myth.

Myth is what the magic stardust of time and distance does to someone else’s reality – things turn bigger and brighter and darker and more numinous for being sprinkled with the stardust of magic and mystery and a pinch of faith.

The world of the folk tale, or fairy tale (which is a form of folk tale woven with a magic thread), is a world that is only touching on the otherworldly, and it depends on what happens to the humans who stumble into that other world. It is not fundamentally about the creatures that inhabit that other world – and it is certainly not about things that are much vaster than the human characters who carry the story. There are no transcendent gods or angels here.

The folk and fairy tales depend on certain accepted tropes and storylines and types of character – they are stories, if you like, of STEREOTYPE. Instantly recognizable stereotype. Princess in peril. The youngest of three princely siblings. Talking animals. Baba Yaga and her cottage with the chicken legs.

That is the world of the fairy tale.

Myth is just BIGGER than everything else. So much bigger.

The myth is inhabited by ARCHETYPES rather than stereotypes. Archetypes are not named. They are not actual character. They are EveryCharacter, they are over-reaching ideas which cross space and time and personal vision. An angel is an archetype; a fairytale princess is not.

There is a very definite archetype vs stereotype divide.

I have used a bit of both in my young adult “Worldweavers” series. My “misfit kids” who turn out to do well for themselves are almost stereotypes – and Thea Winthrop, my protagonist, is very much one, the plucky heroine who “figures it all out”. But in my story the stereotype has acquired added dimensions, and learns and grows through the series in a way that genuine stereotypes never do because they never step out of the mould at all.

On the other hand, the Native American characters from the Worldweavers books (Grandmother Spider, Coyote) are VERY much archetypes, and highly mythopoeic in the sense that their roots lie in deeper and older myths – and they are not confined to any particular story therein, just to a certain kind of ideas and meaning and over-reaching context.

A character like Nikola Tesla can be a little bit of both – he was “real” in the sense that he lived but I have mythologised him in the books to the extent that I have used the nickname that he WAS known by in his own real life, The New Wizard of the West, as a “genuine” title.

So it’s a question of scale, really. Where you peg your character, what context you give that character. A diminished archetype can turn into a stereotype, and a sufficiently exalted stereotype can metamorphose into an archetype – the chasm is not completely impossible to cross.

Tread carefully on the fragile bridge that is the mything link, metamorphosing a story into either star-blazing mythology or the quiet hearthside folktale. Transcended, the archetype vs. stereotype transformation can be absolutely awe-inspiring. Failure means crashing into that chasm, and it’s a long, long way down.

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I am primarily a long-form writer. I’m a natural novelist. I tend to write long and lush and paint a wide horizon using a broad brush (which leaves me room, LOTS of room, to go back in and fill in the fine detail.

And yet… and yet….

In the space of the last two years, I’ve written quite a number of short stories. Now, that isn’t my usual format, and nor do I think that I am going to forsake the novel for the short stuff – but it’s just interesting, because this isn’t the way my mind has worked before now. And I”m wondering what it was that triggered the change.

The directions in which my new lessons are taking me has been an interesting one. I’ve had to rearrange the furniture in my mental writing room in order to do this — I’ve kept the nice comfy armchair by the window, but the lounging couch has been taken to the storage loft. I’m learning to think faster and write leaner, sitting up in that armchair and staring out of the window.

Whereas before I would have spent the time lounging on the couch, noticing the storm-blue of the clouds, glowing oddly in a stray shaft of pre-storm sunshine. I might have noticed the moss growing on the roof below my window. I might have noticed the birds in the sky, and judging from the direction in which the Vs were flying I might have thought about the seasons, whether the birds were coming or going, whether we were headed for summer or for winter. I might have let myself drift – how much longer the days were than only a handful of weeks ago! How the air smelled like spring, and of the lilacs which were still a promise of blossom to come! How it all turns again, and how it seems as though it was just yesterday that the light in the mornings was still the stiff prismatic one of winter and not the softer, more mellow summery glow, and how quickly it will all pass and the winter light would come stalking back across the river.

I might have noticed the guy walking towards the house, on the dusty county road. Eventually. When the story got around to him.

Instead, I notice him now as he moves, a blur of motion in the static landscape – an action in a description mode. And he’s a story, right off. All the beautiful world that surrounds him becomes secondary to the question of where he is hurrying with such urgent purpose, and why.

I’ve an idea for another short story which swam into my head last night on the way home from a night out. I have written down a few key phrases that form the dismembered skeleton of the tale. It is my mission, if I choose to accept it, to go pore over those bones and figure out how they fit together – and if I do it right the story will draw a breath of life and wake and walk. It’s exhilarating. It’s hard work.

The short story is teaching me to take another look at my worlds, see them differently. I don’t know what kind of a writer I will be when I emerge from the other side of this particular formative chrysalis, whether my novels will become sharpened and clarified by the honed vision of the short story or whether I’ll have hamstrung myself into incoherence – in the world of writing, anything can happen, and usually does. But I’m looking forward to the journey, to the learning. I always have. It’s part of the job.

It’s writing.

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Questions are the building blocks of writing. The answers to the questions that you ask are what builds your story, particularly the famous 5 Ws and an H — Who, What, Where, When, Why, How.

Earlier we discussed the character-centric questions, Who, What, Why. Now let’s consider the others.

Nothing takes place in a vacuum. Every single story has to happen somewhere in space, somewhen in time. For this, you will need details and continuity. You need the questions of WHEN and WHERE.

Your story will be very different if it is set in the Stone Age, in Italy during the Renaissance, in China during the Cultural Revolution, in the American South during the height of the Civil Rights movement, or on a 25th Century starship. All of these things require setting up, meticulously.

You may need to do research; you may need to do quite a lot of research. Some of the research may be difficult to the point of being impossible. If you are setting a story in an invented world of your own making but which is based on some particular historical time or place you may have a little more leeway with your details – but anything that’s remotely realistic has to be backed up with the best facts that you can come up with because it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you get some tiny detail wrong you WILL get the kind of reader who will notice and who will lose no time in gleefully pointing out your mistakes. Often loudly. In public.

For instance – do not have clocks in eras where clocks had yet to be invented. This runs deeper than you might think. You might have a character saying flippantly that things are as precise as clockwork… when that character couldn’t recognize clockwork if it smacked him on the nose. In a culture that measures time with hour-candles and sundials, the phrase ‘a few minutes’ may have no practical meaning at all. Do not have pieces of clothing turn up centuries before they were invented, or centuries after they were obsolete.

Continuity comes into play as you keep all of this straight, and you don’t suddenly introduce an anachronism simply because you forgot where or when you were.

These are also the questions that inform the HOW of your story. Murder weapons have to be consistent with your era and with the class or race of the people who are using them. You have to be aware of what your context is, of what your McGuffins can or cannot do under your circumstances, and have your characters behave accordingly.

If they know things, they will have to have come by that knowledge in a manner consistent with the story. You cannot simply have your protagonist reach into thin air and know something JUSTLIKETHAT, or know how to use something they’ve never seen before. This is particularly annoying when you have people transported from our flabby under-exercised world into a space where swords are the weapons of choice… and use said swords without a smidge of training.

Most stories can be deconstructed into those six arenas – and it’s sometimes helpful to pose these questions to your story or your characters if they have become mired. ‘Interview’ your story or your characters and find out where they’re at and what they intend to do next. Sometimes just writing down six lists can be helpful – under WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN, HOW headings – and the lists can be as disjointed and disorganized as you want, nobody else ever has to see them, they’re stream-of-consciousness things where you write the first things that come into your head when you ask that question with your particular story or character in mind.

You can keep ‘em or you can toss ‘em, their value lies in unlocking your mind, not in their intrinsic content.

Happy interrogations.

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When I was just a little girl, my mother used to read to me.

This was not unusual – lots of little girls have their parents read to them when they’re about to tuck them in for the night. Stories are so much a foundation on which our childhoods were built, which whole great cities of our adult lives subsequently sprang from.

But I was, perhaps, different in one respect. I don’t remember having picture books – EVER. I started with words, from the get go, and the book that my mother was reading to me – at age three, and I could not yet read myself – was Johanna Spyri’s “Heidi”.

And I loved it. I loved the story, and even at three years old I somehow found something in it – something more, something richer, than “See Spot Run. I loved it so much, in fact, that when Mum finished reading it to me I squirmed and said, “Start it again.”

And she said, “No, I won’t! You’ve already heard it once. We’ll start on something else next time.”

But I *loved* it. I did. And I was not ready to say goodbye.

So I taught myself to read.

It is my first real coherent childhood memory that I can swear to – me somewhere in between three and four years old, walking into the kitchen, clutching “Heidi” to my chest, and asking my mother if she wanted me to read to her. She, not entirely unexpectedly, heard what she thought she heard – me asking HER to read to ME, not the other way around – and there I was,standing there clutching the self-same book she had already heard me importune her about – and she began to tell me again that no, she wouldn’t read to me, not that, not right then, there was dinner, and there would be a new book… and then I opened the book and started to read from it.

She dropped the pot she was holding.

Granted, I had an advantage – my mother tongue is entirely and completely phonetic and I could figure out the written word from the sounds which I had heard when she had read the thing to me – but still, I had gone away and puzzled it all out, all by myself.

And I haven’t stopped reading since.

When I was growing up there was no such thing as a YA market. Kids read kids books and then they read adult books – and in my house whatever was on the shelves was not forbidden to me. I read the collected works of Howard Spring and Pearl Buck – still in translation, because I was still living in the old country – by the time I was ten – and then we moved, and I learned English, and by thirteen I was reading the complete unabridged John Galsworthy in ENGLISH without much trouble.

I read a few “young” books on the way, aside from the immotal “Heidi”. I worked my way through “Little Women”, and “Pippi Longstocking”. I read the diary of Anne Frank, although I don’t know how YA that might be considered these days. I ploughed through the (I might add unadulterated and unsaccharined) fairy tales from the old dark forests and grey shores of Germany and France and the Scandinavian countries (and let me tell you the original “Little Mermaid” is not at all what Disney made of it…) I fell in love with a series of books about a bunch of kids and their “Lone Pine Club”, by a writer called Macolm Saville. I read Jane Yolen, C S LEwis, Tolkien, some early Zelazny, Asimov,Lloyd Alexander, James Cabell, Ursula Le Guin. I fell more and more in love with more complex and more fascinating historical and fantasy stories, which led from “The Hobbit” to “Lord of the RIngs” and the Silmarillion, from Earthsea to “The Left Hand of Darkness”, from the chronicles of Amber to “A Song for Arbonne” and “Tigana”.

I don’t have a favorite “children’s book”. I was never a child, not in that sense. I don’t even h

At one convention, maybe a year or so ago, this was an actual title of a panel I was on – Pros at Cons. The idea was to explore what a professional (writer, or artist) actually DOES at a convention, how they might approach it differently from the reader, gamer or fan attendee.

[For those who haven't been at a con for awhile, scroll to the end for a short primer…]

The con goers get issued with a program which details the panels which will be available over the course of the convention weekend. There is a limited number of useful topics for such occasions, and some of the hoarier topics have been relentlessly trotted out at every con since God Created Convention.

This is where we come in, the pros you see seated behind the tables in the hotel conference rooms, facing the serried ranks of either depressingly empty or intimidatingly full chairs set out in rows before us.

You get to this point – you’re a professional. You’ve published books or stories, you’ve been PAID for that, or you’re a professional artist, or editor in the field, or simply an expert on some topic and were collared to take part in a panel discussing same. The panel of “Pros At Cons” looked at what was expected of the folk on THIS side of the table, the pontificators – whether we were really here as revered professionals or whether we were the hired entertainment, the performing seals, planted in our seats by the program planners to keep the masses happy and out of mischief over the course of a weekend.

There are many reasons one becomes a writer – and at least one of them involves a fundamental personality trait: writers are notorious for being loners. It’s a solitary profession where you retire to your office and face off with your computer, and it’s you in your own world surrounded by characters and creatures of your own making.

Some of us can shrug that off and at least put on a show of being gregarious at conventions, mingling and schmoozing and generally mixing with the crowds – and, to all intents and purposes, actually enjoy ourselves. For others, it isn’t so easy. Some folk are genuinely quiet and shy and not natural public speakers.

If you happen to run across me in a crowded party full of people I barely know, I’m likely to be the one cowering in a corner and hoping that someone might start a conversation because I sure as hell am not going to walk up to a stranger and stick out a hand and introduce myself. However – put me on a panel where I am supposed to speak about writing, and I blossom into an articulate and eloquent speaker with active opinions which I am not at all shy about expounding on or defending. It touches my passion, and that changes everything. I am no longer just a writer, I am WRITER, hear me roar. This is something that defines me. And I can conquer the tongue-tied shy little girl who often dominates my social interactions with strangers. When I am wrapped in that writer cloak, the things I have to say become meaningful given the writerly context in which they are uttered.

People like me go to conventions because we have written books, and conventions are where our readers are. At the one I was just at last weekend , I have had several people come up to me in the hallways just to tell me, “I liked your books”. That, in itself, is a pearl beyond price.

Ask any writer and they will tell you – we have no way of knowing what happens to our books once they’re out there, once they’re on shelves and in readers’ hands, and we have no further control over any of it. Hearing feedback – particularly when it’s the positive kind – is the only way we have of being able to gauge how our words affects those who read them. We go to conventions to meet people like this, people who have read our work.

We also go, and present ourselves at serried ranks of panels, because what we are really hoping to do is introduce ours