The Spark of Creation

A friend of mine recently gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, the most striking example of the spark of creation. While some of us, myself included, will never be as creative as that, we can point to our more modest endeavors of, say, performing in a play, painting a landscape, writing a song, or writing a book. In my case, writing books has always been my creative spark (although I have written some songs, but let’s not go there). 

In particular, my spark has been writing a series of esoteric, very niche, very “different” young-adult fantasies that feature nary a human among their pages (although that will change further along in the series, but I digress). In fact, some very un-human creatures called the Marrhob interact quite powerfully with my stalwart main characters, the dog Corto and the fox Renard. It’s all about trust, friendship, tolerance, love, and a bunch more themes. 

But back to the spark of creation. Finishing the writing of a book is like giving birth (yes, yes, it’s not as painful, but it is still labor-intensive, ;-) ). If you have read or seen Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and you are a writer, you will recall the gut-wrenching, heart-breaking scene when Hedda burns Eilert’s manuscript, the only copy of the “child” he had spent years creating. It’s powerful stuff, creation, in any form it takes. We are lucky that today we can make backup copies of our manuscripts on our thumb drives. 

I’ll be serious. After fooling around for weeks preparing the paperback version of The Animal Guild, the first book in my series of the same name, I’ve almost finished my labors on it, and it is nearly available for purchase via Amazon’s CreateSpace store. I’m not quite there yet; you can’t rush creation when you are distracted by yardwork, housework, spouse, and squeaky toys in the adorable mouths of your demanding dogs. I’ve also been flashing back on the days of copy-editing and formatting magazines because of all the nit-picky decisions to be made about folio placement, gutter width, fonts, page size, and even page color. (At least now I can take my time deciding, with no magazine issue deadlines to be met, but let’s not go there.) 

Anyway, check back soon, and I’ll bet The Animal Guild in paperback will be ready for you. Till then, keep creating and reading.