Into the Mystic

Writing challenges me more than anything else I know. Making reality fit intention wrestles on the page with letting magic trump reason.

When I’m running on empty I turn to poets and troubadours for inspiration.

My dear friend Susan gave me a book of poems, and the poem for June 18 was written by Percy Shelley. The last year of his life, he wrote this poem for another man’s wife after hearing her play the guitar he gave her:

Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

The magic of that world of music can evade on the written page. I need magic in my novel manuscript because it’s about music, that intoxicating elixir.

I’ve turned to writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez to study the trade. I’ve enjoyed reading books, like Bel Canto, that try to capture on paper the aura around a singer. The three sci-fi writers in my Raleigh coffee klatch told me that the cow can’t suddenly jump over the moon on page one hundred.

Seeds. I had to plant seeds early so as not to spook readers later.

Most of my friends know me as a girl caught in the two dimensions of what she can plainly see in front of her face. It’s not just that I have to open up and believe, but I have to take my readers down with me.

Nature does her share. Carolina feeds me daily. While I’m working on feeding a family in the kitchen, sycamores and pines beckon to me from a southern-facing window.

One morning last month I rose craving miracles and I turned to the miracle-maker: Mother Nature.

My camera could hardly keep pace with the wonders.







Most days I feel like my writing conveys a tree in a forest



But what I really want my readers to see is the mystical light on the tree trunk,





and that kind of sun just doesn’t shine every day at my keyboard.

I want to rock your gypsy soul/
Just like way back in the days of old/
And together we will float into the mystic
Van Morrison, "Into the Mystic"