Any Parting Could Be Forever, And We

Stories Are Artifacts, Not Really Made Things Which We Create And Can Take Credit For, But Pre-existing Objects Which We Dig Up.

How Do We Remember To Remember? That's A Question I've Asked Myself Often Since My Time On Duma Key, Often In The Small Hours Of The Morning, Looking Up Into The Absence Of Light, Remembering Absent Friends. Sometimes In Those Little Hours I Think About The Horizon. You Have To Establish The Horizon. You Have To Mark The White. A Simple Enough Act, You Might Say, But Any Act That Re-makes The World Is Heroic. Or So I've Come To Believe.

I Think Most Of Us Can Remember From Our Own Childhood, Just In The Disney Cartoons, Things That Frightened Us Profoundly. For Me It Was Bambi, The Scene When The Forest Was On Fire. That Was Something I Had Nightmares About. I Can't Imagine Being A Little Kid Of Eight And Seeing Night Of The Living Dead With Living Corpses Eating The Flesh Of Living People.

The World Had Teeth And It Could Bite You With Them Anytime It Wanted.

The Writer's Original Perception Of A Character Or Characters May Be As Erroneous As The Reader's.