Currently Reading: The Magician by, Lev Grossman
On the Farm: Three fresh eggs, 2 dozen cherry tomatoes, red and gold potatoes

I spent a glorious summer doing all those summery things that one is meant to do. I had a wonderful adventure, planted and harvested a delicious assortment of vegetables, canned enough green beans and made enough jam to last through the winter, picked blueberries, drank sangria on the back deck, spent lazy time with friends, ate off the BBQ nearly every night, got the first few eggs from our new hens, learned to trim chicken feathers, began training a puppy, survived a Pacific Northwest heat wave, bought a pig at the Northwest Washington Fair, provided all the lovely country-living-props for the play Oklahoma!, rarely went to the grocery store, watched my baby goat grow big, looked out over the red tipped pastures, and found time to be still.

During the very last gasp of summer vacation we had friends come visit. Chaos ensued. And then in a rare hushed moment, the phrase Magical Thinking floated through the room. Obviously this is not a new concept—Freud may have been the first one to coin it, and Magical Thinking is also very much the basis of Magical Realism.

But the concept as applied to LIFE is what struck me. The idea that we can decide to believe and make that belief a reality. We've all done it at times, taken a deep look at ourselves and decided that something has to change, some quirk, or annoyance, or self pity needs to be exorcised. You imagine it. You practice it. And then you become it.

Some might prefer to call this Neural Linguistic Programing. And that would be fine. But I'm a writer and I prefer to think of it as Magical Thinking.

Magical Thinking goes hand in hand with some of those other odd feelings that strike us at times—a sense of deja vu, or feeling that things happen for a reason.

And for me, good fiction is all about Magical Thinking. Not magic in the strictly Harry Potter sense, but magic as a way of thinking, an approach to seeing the world and describing it in prose.

I've always been one of those readers that fall in love with language and can linger over a book for endless hours awash in delicious metaphors and turns of phrase that are either so true or so wholly new that they make my heart expand.

A good plot drives me forward, and gets me from one point to the next. Well developed characters, that you believe would narrate in this kind of lyrical voice, bring a well written novel to the next level. And then a case of Magical Thinking brings it all home.

It takes a certain amount of bravery to allow your mind to wander to far off corners, to places where no one has walked before, to be the first to leave footprints in the white snow.

We can argue over there being no original plots, and I'd probably agree with you. But voice. Oh, voice! That's where an acute case of Magical Thinking causes a raging, hot fever and makes your heart pound.

This is you very own ground where no person has trod before. And where good writing becomes brilliant.

Image: Icelandic Magical Stave courtesy of Wikimedia Common