Tap, tap, tap...

Throw your hands up in the air if you feel me.

I tend to be a pretty stable guy with the exception of short periods of relative emotional excess. While these points in my life make a large impression on me (and those in my immediate vicinity) when they occur, they can hardly be described as sporadic and calling them frequent would be an outright lie. That said, something happens to me when I write.

Inevitably, you write what you know. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Tolkien's Middle Earth saga bears a striking resemblance to World War II. George Lucas invented a story set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and yet most of us saw ourselves in most of his characters (not Chewbacca). Of course I'm not talking about suddenly gaining telekinetic powers and setting out on an intergalactic quest to kill your father in a ship that can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. If you don't know what I mean by that, you are probably a communist.

No matter how you dress it up, invention tends to be more about interesting new recombination than, well, invention. Now, I've already laid my cards down and explained the general genre in which I am working at the moment (science fiction/fantasy-ish). Despite the fact that my story could never actually take place (hopefully and to the best of my knowledge) it has somehow tapped into some deeply emotional places that I didn't know I had. While this newfound self-knowledge is great in an aquired wisdom sense, it's also kind of freaking me out. Just when I thought I had myself figured out I get blindisded from left field. I did my best to begin my novel as un-autobiographical as possible, but somehow all of my characters have facets of their growing personalities that are freakish little mirrors reflecting some pretty telling parts of myself.

Hollar back if your writing is tapping into previously unexplored bits of your psyche.

It's a frightening thing to discover that you aren't who you at first had assumed you were. This whole writing thing just keeps getting more interesting.