Something is awakening.  It has been coming on for awhile, perhaps years, growing like a weed through a crack in pavement. 

Where has it gone?  That feeling of magic…of endless possibilities?  

I am happy to tell you that it is still there.  For me, the best place to find it is in true, classic fantasy, horror and science fiction.  

Try it. Reread the books you may have read years ago, and then find new ones.

These classic authors all give different things.

George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tolkien, of course, C.S. Lewis, a dose of Edgar Rice Burroughs and my personal favorite, Lloyd Alexander. Then there are Grand Masters Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, and Anne McCaffrey.

These are mostly from previous generations. There are many more, of course…and new ones, living and writing now.  As an author myself, I want you to find these for yourselves.

I will offer more detailed lists of these authors and specific works in the future, as will guest bloggers…and describe what they mean to me and what they give.

The point now is to reawaken imagination and apply it to all things.

There is adventure in every shaft of light, every shadow behind a chair, every flower or weed striving through cement to find again the garden that was there before the parking lot tar was poured.  

In the corner of a workplace as you sit, that cobweb…what creature made it?  Maybe it is from another dimension or ‘beyond the fields we know’ as Lord Dunsany would say.  That sound, it is the bounce of a water bottle, the scrape of a chair against the floor…or something more mysterious?

You walk by the park and see wild glints of sunlight rippling across the pond…and you can understand how people, not so long ago, thought they saw fairies dancing there and thought them real.  You can let yourself see them too…and pretend they are real, just for a moment…or for a lifetime. Time loses its grip on your spirit.

When you return home the possibilities are endless.  

“How can I wake up my life to what it might be?” you think,  “what was that sweet, funny or wild dream that I had years ago?

“Reading my stories reminds me, maybe I can still do it…or do it in a different way…or just enjoy the thought of it, here, in my lair, my cave…my refuge.

“I may not tell everyone that my imagination is back.  I don’t want my private glorious and colorful world, my reawakening, to be laughed at or ridiculed.  Maybe I do have someone, or a few someones, to find a way to share it with – children, friends, family…or kindred souls on a blog…:)”

Turn to the great fantasy stories.  In them the fullness of human imaginative life is explored.  A mote of light becomes a universe. Bullies and dullards become eccentric beings.  Monsters are vanquished, quests reborn. The power of metaphor is the power of gods.

See with imagination. True fantasy is escape, refuge, exploration and truth. 

The adventure has just begun.