Four Day Weekend, lalala

Due to 60 mph winds, torrential rain, and other nasty weather today, school was cancelled. Which means I now am smack in the middle of a four day weekend. What a glorious place to be.

Of course, my teachers will probably retaliate with crushing loads of homework next week. As any fairytale reader knows, all joys must be paid for. Still, I don't mind right now. I'm relishing the tropical rain-smell coming through my window slats, and am writing. As usual.

My imagination is like a maze, or an onion. I bury myself so deeply inside it that I have to peel away layers in order to find myself again, and oftentimes I have so much fun that I really don't want to come back out. But necessity always dictates that I do. I'll be in a character's head . . . and then I have to retreat to watching the character from the outside . . . then retreat until I'm looking at the scene from the outside . . . and then I have to step outside of the fictional world I was exploring . . . and then I find I'm in Hawaii, surrounded by misty green mountains where the rainfall makes a hundred waterfalls. My grandmother says that when a really big storm comes and the air is clear enough you can see all the waterfalls and it looks as though the mountains are crying. I walked around in a happy poetical daze for hours after hearing that!

So--after a long and involved time storycrafting I emerge from the Fairyland inside my head to this place, where the brooding sky is like silver, and the mountains weep. Fantasy and magic and stories of elves and enchanted places aren't escapist at all. Because if you look at the world you live in correctly--well, sometimes you can't even tell the difference.