AUTHOR'S CORNER;

ALONE IN MY BUSY MIND!!

Now, when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, right? There is always a positive side to every negative and the sun always, always shines, even if the skies are grey and overcast! The world spins to many different tunes and there is more than one way to find happiness.  In other words, there is room enough for all of us in this life!  Yet in my mind, in my writer's mind, amongst the jargon, words, ideas and half plots of stories that are all fighting to get out at the same time, I often find myself ..... well I often find myself beside myself with desperation and frustration and an unhealthy need to push ahead!  

The need to live and relive and act and react and bring to life the reality of my warped and confused fragile mind often overwhelms me to the point of mild depression.  Why? Simple, I am a writer; which means I have an over active imagination and a fragile self esteem.  I need to imagine in order to feel complete.  I need to create worlds at my finger tips in order to build walls of armour and fortresses of disguise.  My temper flares as do my plots and goes on a low as does my will to continue what I am doing!  I am basically the blank page on which I write and I shape and reshape myself image by plots and fantasies. I only ever truly belong when I am in my novels and the world, the real world, is but a fictional reality that I find myself forced to reside in.... insanity is never that far away!

Life in it's stark form tends to bore me and leaves me despondent, I need to create and alter it slightly in order to feel whole.  And though there is lots I love about my life, lots I appreciate and I do have a lot to be grateful for, this is a problem I have suffered from an early age; my imaginary friends always seemed to follow me around as a child, and when it came to choosing between them and the real world, they always seemed to come up trumps!  They understood me, they appreciated my quirkiness more than any real life person could, and yes, I am aware...it could be because they were merely an extension of myself, a world which I had created.

When days were grey, I could conjure up the sun and when friends were sparse I could have a whole crowd around me.  And criticism was not present in my world, only in the outside world.  Inside my mind, the world was how it should be....playing to my tune!  In my world the world was real; real in my perception and solid in my convictions.  In my world, I was able to explore dangerous situations safely, love without getting hurt, cry without shedding any tears.  In my world....in any writer's world, the world is a playground, full of adventure without limitations or taboos.  

I suffer what most writers suffer; I exist in two worlds, coinciding and colliding; often intruding on one another, sometimes crashing into each other and wobbling at my

sensitivities and making me temperamental.  I see the personalities of people as though I were looking through a microscope; I read several traits into one personality and understand far more the intricate body gestures and facial expressions.  I see human love, suffering, anguish and distress, I see poverty and wealth and read into all what I see.  And it overwhelms and overpowers and sometimes I just need to recreate it all on paper in order to make sense of it all!  To stop the story reel rolling, and to quieten the confusion in my head....I recreate it all in order to kill it all!

In order to revive it all again and make sense of the world in which I exist!  To quieten my dreams and sleep soundly, knowing that I have reinterpreted the world the way I see it.   Madness? Perhaps, or maybe just a different point of view. Whatever you want to call it, rest assured most of 'us' writers have the same predicament, live with the scenarios that play themselves out day in day out in our minds.  Dream of normality yet seek to find it upon the twisted pages of our stories.  It is how we make sense of the world.  And when we are not heard, when we are not picked up and read, it leaves us self doubting and empty.  When we pour our hearts and souls out upon the blank pages and nobody notices, it leaves us wondering, it leaves us doubting....it makes us invisible and renders us vulnerable.  

For what are we if not the ghosts that play upon the haunted house of the minds?  What are we if not the spirit that shapes and reshapes the cognitive thinking of our readers?  What are we if we are not able to pass in and out of people's senses and thoughts?  What are we, if we are not writing the world to rights?