On Making Things

I'm lucky to have the sort of mother who never throws things out - at least, not things her children have made, no matter how long ago or how badly.  I was over at her house the other day, helping her go through drawers, and out of one of them emerged this rather sorry-looking embroidered bird.  I'll explain more about him in a minute.

In Chaucer’s time, the word for a poet or author was ‘a maker’ - as witness the Scots poet William Dunbar’s luminous ‘Lament for the Makers’, in which he lists poet after poet taken by ‘the strong unmerciful tyrant’, death:

‘He has done piteouslie devour
The noble Chaucer, of makers flower;
The Monk of Bery, and Gower all three:
Timor mortis conturbat me.’

(In fact, damn it, go and read the poem first, and come back and read this after you’ve done.)

‘Maker’: I’ve always liked it. It’s less high-falutin’ than ‘author’ or ‘poet’: it links us inextricably – as we ought to be linked – with every other sort of human creativity. People make furniture. We make paintings, musical instruments and gardens. We make brain scanners, television programmes and films. We make homes. We make love – which as Ursula K Le Guin once wrote in the ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ (go and read that too), ‘doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.’

None of these things (furniture, gardens, brain scanners etc) just happen. You can’t make anything worth having without a great deal of effort. I should know, because every spring I spend days digging weeds (mainly bindweed roots: thick, white, snappy coiling things) out of my flower beds. But what a difference the work makes when summer comes!

Children love to make things, and they ought to be encouraged to do so and praised for the results - even if the results aren't perfect in some adult, idealistic, Platonic sense. Writing is 'making something' just as much as modelling with clay or painting a picture: and primary school children especially ought to be allowed to experiment and have fun and feel proud of themselves - not to be marked and judged and compared and made to feel unskilled and inadequate. My brother and I were part of the Blue Peter generation, and he was fantastic at making things out of Squeezy bottles and cornflakes packets. He went on to construct model planes that really flew, and can now turn his hand to just about anything, including boats, house extensions, and beautiful, glossy musical instruments like mandolas. He’s become an accomplished folk musician who can compose his own tunes.

Me, I tried. I longed to own a model sailing ship, so I made my own very ugly one out of balsa wood (d'you remember balsa wood, light and fragile, and soft enough to be cut with scissors?) and painted it yellow. It had so many holes in the hull, it would have sunk like a stone, but I made it and loved it till it was squashed flat in a house removal by heartless, careless men from Pickfords. I longed to own an exquisite piece of Chinese embroidery I’d seen framed in a big house, smothered in birds and flowers – so I found a bit of frayed blue satin and laboriously stitched away.  And the result?  The puckered, lumpy, clumsy bird at the head of this post.

I wanted a miniature Chinese garden like one I’d read about in a book – so I borrowed a tray and arranged gravel and stones and moss around a tin lid (for the pool) and stood some china ornaments around it till the moss dried and the tray got knocked over. Oh, and I wanted an eighth Narnia book, so I got an old blue notebook and wrote my own. Here it is:

(You can see more of it on my website.) And although none of the things I made may have been any good by some unrealistic ultimate critical standard, it was the making that counted.

Even while I was making it I knew perfectly well that my embroidered bird fell short - far, far short - of the beautiful thing I'd seen and wanted to copy.  And no, I never became any more competent with a needle than that.  But at least I tried to be a maker. For me, the writing is what has lasted. I’m not an embroiderer or a woodworker or a musician. I'd love to be, but I know I haven't the time or the patience to learn the craft.  And that's the thing - going back to Chaucer again: 'The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne'.  When I'm writing I can't begin to tell you how many times I rewrite every page, every sentence. We - children - all of us - need to try lots of different things, so that we can figure out what to concentrate on, what to practice and get good at.  But it's all making, all of it! and any child who hammers a nail in straight, paints a picture or bakes brownies knows how good it feels.

Here’s a poem by Robert Bridges which says it all, really - the aspiration, the delight, and the inevitable falling short.  But isn't that why we pick ourselves up and try again?

I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them.
God hath no better praise,
And Man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.

I too will something make,
And joy in the making,
Although tomorrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream,
Remembered on waking.

Faerie-led

What makes a writer choose one subject over another, one genre over another?  What draws one writer to contemporary fiction, another to historical fiction, fantasy, or thrillers?  While I know and admire a number of authors who can handle a variety of forms (Gillian Philip and Nicola Morgan, for example, who seem equally and brilliantly at home with both gritty thrillers and historical or fantasy novels) – there are others like myself who stick to a single last.  From the age of about ten, writing fantasy has been my first and only love.

This doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t had qualms.  I’ve asked myself, in the past, what relevance fantasy has or can have to the problems of life.  Can it really be serious?  Shouldn’t I – shouldn’t I? – be writing something more meaningful?

But I have come to the conclusion that what is done with a whole heart, with love, and with as much artistic truth as I can personally muster, must be good enough.  More than that is out of my control.  I don’t have a choice.  There is in writing, as in all art  – Susan Price has eloquently written about it for Katherine Robert's Muse Mondays, here – something that feels remarkably like outside inspiration: a fierce compulsion that grasps you by the hair and demands and absolutely requires: this is what you will write about: this and this alone. If you don’t obey it you feel restless, haunted. You cannot ignore it.  You cannot decide to write about something else.  (Or if you try, what you turn out will be stale, flat and unprofitable.)

The problem is that the divine or daemonic impulse will only take you so far.  It sets you going and then leaves you to stumble on alone as best you can.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get occasional vivid flashes to light your path, but for the rest, you’ll need patience, persistence, technique and plenty of common sense.  This applies no matter what type of fiction you happen to have fallen in love with. 

But it’s good to be aware of the particular pitfalls of your chosen genre.  I wouldn’t like to speak for others, but in the early mid stages of my career as a fantasy writer I was anxious for a while about the possibility of getting carried away by colourful but superficial effects, and forgetting or neglecting emotional truth. What it boils down to is, that whatever their circumstances, the characters should have space to live and breathe.  Ulysses isn’t just a man island-hopping from one astounding adventure to another: he’s a war-weary veteran desperate to get home.  Malory’s Lancelot isn’t merely the best knight in the world and a hero sans reproche, he’s a breathing, fallible man torn between his honour and his sense of sin: his love for Arthur and his love for Guinevere.  He knows he’s unworthy of the Holy Grail – so when he’s finally allowed to perform a miracle of healing, he reacts with uncontrollable tears, weeping ‘like a child that has been beaten’. 

Here’s a short ballad I wrote to warn myself about the dangers of following the queen of faerie rather too far into the dry lands. 



As I walked out one summer day,
under the summer sky,
I saw about me the hills of summer
quaking with heat, and I

wondering saw a fair lady ride
down a slope in my mind:
it seemed she was the queen of fays
with the fairy host behind;

but they passed over the dry grass
through the quivering air
like vague thoughts passing
that are hardly there:

and where was the green velvet
and the rich jangling bells,
and the colour, and the dazzle
that the ballad tells

bewildered young Thomas the Rhymer
under the Eildon tree? –
thinking she was the queen of heaven
he bent his knee:

but it’s no, no, she says, no,
I am not what you think.
I cannot give you water and wine,
only dust to drink:


and you shall gain nothing from me
of knowledge of men;
but you shall blow down the hillside
ghostly in the sun.





Picture credit: Thomas Rhymer by Joseph Noel Paton

Childhood writing

I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t writing. My mother wrote; my grandmother wrote: it always seemed an occupation as natural as breathing. Back in my early schooldays, the emphasis was always on reading and writing. (Arithmetic fell on stony ground.) Fairytales, poems and Bible stories went in, and poems, descriptions and stories flowed out.

 I still have an exercise book from when I was about eight. Remember those lined exercise books, with their supple paper covers in dusty blues, maroons or greys, two staples in the spine? The teachers cut them in half to make two smaller books with one staple each. On each page we wrote what were termed stories, but really they were only a couple of lines long:

I have a little DOG who looks like a big baby her name is Lassie and I play with her and at night wen the gas fire is lit she lies down flat on the floor. 

The moon is rising in the sky wen I look out of the window. It looks just like a silver ball floting jently in the sky

“Floating gently like a silver ball…” I was the same writer then that I am now.


When I was nine I began writing poetry. I’d heard that Shakespeare was the greatest English poet, but he’d died hundreds of years ago. Nobody had written better poetry since then? Look out world, I thought, here I come! I’d need to practise, of course, I knew that: but I reckoned that by the time I was grown up, I would probably be at least as good as Shakespeare. I spent my time reading, writing, and riding ponies. My schoolfriends admired my stories, especially if they were about horses – or later, about ethereal love affairs between lords and ladies ‘as beauteous as the stars’. I was rubbish at all subjects except English and Art, but in those I was sure I was good. Have at look at this epic treatment of thunder: Thor and all...

As you can see, I didn't have the natural lyricism that many child poets have. I think I was already struggling to be 'literary'.  Perhaps I read too much (lots of 19th century poetry from The Children's Encyclopaedia: I remember particularly admiring Byron's heavily overdone 'Mazeppa's Ride').

In order to become the new Shakespeare, of course, I would have to write a play or two. My verse drama career kicked off (and ended) with an adaptation – don’t laugh too hard – of ‘The Lord of The Rings’ in pantomime couplets. I took this very seriously. My group of friends was going to act it out in the apple loft of our barn (we lived in the country); and we spent ages making costumes out of curtains. The script has long since vanished, but I can still remember two lines from the play. Frodo and Sam are struggling across Mordor, and Frodo pauses to exclaim:

“The Dark Tower seems – ah! – just as far away.
We’ll reach it not tomorrow, ne’er mind today!”


Pretty good, huh? See that neat poetical inversion, and the apostrophe? I can’t remember now if the play was ever put on - probably not; I think our parents weren't that supportive - but we got some fun out of the rehearsals. And meantime I was writing a book of short stories about magic. It was springtime: I used to sit outside scribbling, and the sunshine and the celandines somehow found their way into the stories.



“Once there was a golden land, full-filled with mirth and joy
And in that land a lady lived, more beauteous than the stars,
And she took joy in simple things
Like butterflies with coloured wings
And little flowers, and green green grass,
And crickets’ chirp, and birdsong…”


I'm not sure I've ever been happier.  Oh, it’s bad, I know it’s bad! But I didn’t know that then. All I knew then was that I was writing my absolute best: and to this day I don’t know a better feeling.


Soon after that I began a series of discoveries. I discovered Alan Garner, and started writing a long story based on ‘Celtic’ mythology. I discovered Rupert Brooke, and threw myself into sonnets beginning with lines like: Dream-like on the broad river drifting slow… I discovered Mary Renault and tried my hand at historical fiction. And, somewhere along the line, I discovered how to be self-critical…and the gates of the Garden of Eden shut behind me.

On Making

In Chaucer’s time, the word for a poet or author was ‘a maker’ - as witness the Scots poet William Dunbar’s luminous ‘Lament for the Makers’, in which he lists poet after poet taken by ‘the strong unmerciful tyrant’, death:

‘He has done piteouslie devour

The noble Chaucer, of makers flower;

The Monk of Bery, and Gower all three:

Timor mortis conturbat me.’

(In fact, damn it, go and read the poem first, and come back and read this after you’ve done.)

‘Maker’: I’ve always liked it. It’s less high-falutin’ than ‘author’ or ‘poet’: it links us inextricably – as we ought to be linked – with every other sort of human creativity. People make furniture. They make paintings, musical instruments and gardens. They make brain scanners, television programmes and films. They make homes. They make love – which as Ursula K Le Guin once wrote in the ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ (go and read that too), ‘doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.’ None of these things (furniture, gardens, brain scanners etc) just happen. You can’t make anything worth having without a lot of effort. I should know, because I spent days this summer digging bindweed roots (thick, white, snappy coiling things) out of the rosebed.  And last year I had to do exactly the same thing.  But if I didn't, the garden would disappear under the weeds, and a garden is a lovesome thing, God wot. 

My brother and I were part of the 'Blue Peter' generation (for North American readers, 'Blue Peter' was and is a much-loved and long-running children's TV show, showcasing an idiosyncratic mixture of outdoor adventure, topical interest, pets, cookery and model-making).  My brother was fantastic at making things out of Squeezy bottles and cornflakes packets. He went on to construct balsa wood planes that really flew, and can now turn his hand to just about anything, including boats, house extensions, and beautiful, glossy musical instruments like this mandola. He’s also an accomplished folk musician who can compose his own tunes.

Me, I tried. I longed to own a model sailing ship, so I made my own very ugly one out of balsa wood, and painted it yellow. It had so many holes in the hull, it would have sunk like a stone, but I made it and loved it till it was squashed flat in a house removal. I wanted to own an exquisite piece of Chinese embroidery I’d seen, smothered in birds and flowers – so I got a bit of frayed blue satin and laboriously stitched away at a puckered, lumpy, clumsy bird.

I wanted a miniature Chinese garden like one I’d read about in a book – so I borrowed a tray and arranged gravel and stones and moss around a tin lid (for the pool) and stood some china ornaments around it till the moss dried and the tray got knocked over. Oh, and I wanted an eighth Narnia book, so I got an old blue notebook and wrote my own. (You can see it here if you like.) And though none of the things I made may have been any good (by some ultimate critical standard), it was the making of them that counted.

While I was still at school, teachers and other random adults would sometimes remind us that 'it doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game'.  It did matter if we won or lost (and those same adults secretly thought so, and we knew it) so we didn't pay too much attention.  Still, the moral was well meant.  For winning or losing is pointless unless you already care about the game. I was no good at sports, didn't enjoy the game, and therefore neither cared nor tried: but sometimes now, if I'm talking to children in schools about writing, I tell them it's very much like practising a sport.  You can have talent and do nothing with it.  Or you can have talent and enjoy writing as a hobby.  Or you can have talent, and practise regularly, and study technique, and with a bit of luck thrown in you may become a professional.  Even in today's celebrity culture, children readily understand that you don't get to play for Manchester United, or in the Men's or Women's Finals at Wimbledon, without putting in a lot of hard work.  (Maybe that's why sportsmen and women are so revered.)  But it's all right to do things as well as you can.  We should let ourselves off sometimes.  Children (and adults) need to remember that it's all right not to play football as well as David Beckham.  We have the right to enjoy doing things at our own level.

For me, the writing is what has lasted.  I'm never likely to become an embroiderer or woodcarver.  But it’s all making, and any child who hammers a nail in straight, paints a picture or bakes brownies knows how good it feels. 

Here’s a poem by Robert Bridges which I learned by heart when I was about nine. It says, so beautifully, exactly what I feel.

I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them.

God hath no better praise,

And Man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make,

And joy in the making,

Although tomorrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream,

Remembered on waking.

The Shadow Hunt

Will you all excuse me today if I  indulge in a little fanfare?  Because this is the publication day in America of my book 'The Shadow Hunt' - and you can see the cover, to the right of this post. 'The Shadow Hunt' is what I would describe as a children's historical fantasy based on Celtic and medieval legends, and it took over most of my life for one and a half years.

Ta-ran-tara, ta-ran-tara!

Writing a book is such darned hard work, and frankly such a lonely occupation, that a publication day is genuinely a time to rejoice.  As I've explained, I gave this blog its name because writing is very much like crossing seven miles of hill on fire and seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea. 

When you begin writing a new book - as I'm doing now - it feels impossible.  IM-possible.  I have these ideas, and these characters, and a situation, and I feel I don't know half enough about them, and I set out on a long journey of discovery, all the time with the fear that I'll never get there.  But gradually, at a snail-like pace, the pages stack up till there are twenty... fifty... a hundred... (I print out and revise as I go: it may well take me months to write a hundred pages) ...till I find myself in the middle of the book, in the middle of this long stretch of work that's been going on seemingly forever, and will go on seemingly forever.  And at this point, I sleep, eat, dream the book.  I go to bed at night with my mind running the characters like a computer simulation, and I wake in the small hours and in the mornings thinking about them and understanding a little bit more and a little bit more.  It's exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying, and highly anti-social. 

My life is subsumed into the writing process.  I read, but only books which will help with the research, the background, the symbolism, or the actions of the characters.  I go for walks or drives, so that I can think and think about the book.  I shut myself up to go over and over the pages already written, to rewrite, to shred, to revise, to - as far as lies within me - to perfect.

The tipping point comes.  A day arrives when I recognise that the book WILL BE WRITTEN: that enough has been done to give the story a life of its own.  Like an unborn child, it's viable.  Life gets a little easier then.  And at last the final chapter, the final pages get written in a rush of euphoria.

It's done!  I've finished!  Free at last of the awful tyranny of the powerful god or daemon of creation.  Free for a while to do ordinary things, think ordinary thoughts, dig the garden, go shopping. The editing and all that - that's just work, to be enjoyed or grumbled through in an everyday way.  It's not to be compared with the sucking-you-down-into-the-deeps, never-letting-you-get-a-breath, octopus-grip of the creation-god.

So here's to publication day, along with a couple of starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and the very pleasant news that 'The Shadow Hunt' has been chosen by the Junior Library Guild, to be reviewed in its July edition.  You can find out more about it on my website.

If you think the book sounds like something you might like, please give it a go!

Shining a light into the dark

If you are a writer, have you ever kept a diary?  I'm guessing you have. I started one when I was nine. “Mrs Butler’s school,” runs the first entry, “went to Stump Cross Caverns. We went down a long flight of steps and it was quite dark. Some tunnels were borded [sic] up. It felt strange being so far below the ground. There were many stalactites.”
 

Not very descriptive, but although the entry is pretty laconic, I reckon I was impressed. Impressed enough to want to record it. Anyway, I’ve been going underground in fiction ever since – in ‘Troll Fell’ and ‘Troll Mill’, and in my latest book 'Dark Angels' ('The Shadow Hunt' in the States).  I’m actually rather claustrophobic, but I do find caves fascinating. Each time I write about them I head off underground to collect first-hand impressions: for Dark Angels this meant a crawl - literally - down a Roman lead-mine in Shropshire: the entrance tunnel was approximately two feet high. It was wet, stony, uncomfortable, and of course unlit; and I wasn’t at all sure I could do it. But I did. I sat there in the dark and wrote (on a notebook I couldn't see) scrawled and broken sentences about what I could feel and smell and hear.  And I swore to myself that there would be no cheating this time – no writing about magical lights or mysterious phosphorescence. Unless they took candles along with them, my characters would be in the dark.

It’s interesting (to me at least) that this fascination with caves started so long ago. I’ve kept a diary on and off ever since, and in my early twenties recorded a number of conversations with a guy I worked with, who belonged to the Cave Rescue. He was for ever being hauled out of bed at 2 am to go down pot-holes and drag out people who had got stuck. Sometimes they were alive, sometimes they most definitely weren’t. One night the team was called out to rescue an eighteen-year old girl from a university club who’d fallen down a ninety foot pitch. 

“When we looked at her” (he told me) “we could see that if we moved her we were going to kill her, so we stayed with her till the medics came down with oxygen. But even then we were still going to kill her if we moved her, and she died down there about half an hour after we reached her.

“It was pretty wet. Luckily she wasn’t very big, so it was easier getting her out – you know, it’s a pretty tight passage.” He paused. “She didn’t look very good when most people saw her. When we got to her she wasn’t so bad, because the water had washed her clean.” He paused again. “It’s going to be an awful shock for her mother.”

Strong and terse: he was shaken and emotional. I felt the emotion too, but also I was trying to learn how to write dialogue. I would go home and scribble down what I remembered. I wasn't being callous, but this is what writers do. I’m still moved by what he said - even more, if possible, now I have daughters that age myself - but I'd have forgotten about it years ago if I hadn’t written it down.

There's times when it’s handy to turn up an old diary and find something to jog the mind into action. Weather writing, for example. Me and my brother walking on the moors in the heavy winter snow of 1979:

In places the snow looked just like the surface of a clean new mushroom, white and peeling a little all over. Later, coming down the tarn road, shadows on the snow were a luminous, pale violet. 

We all think we can remember just how it felt to be young. But a diary is there as a sort of reality check. I said and wrote some things which now seem outrageous - and I'm sure, without the diary there to prove it, I'd have edited them out of my memory.  You could say that going back into old diaries is another sort of caving - delving into the past, sometimes crawling into uncomfortable places.  


When I was just sixteen I moved to a new school, and one day during an English lesson some of my new friends discovered that I wrote poetry.   For fun. I had never thought writing poetry was at all odd; but they were utterly baffled by it; and then I became baffled by their bafflement... we gaped at one another like goldfish in separate bowls.  The teacher, who was not more ten years older than us, took advantage of the moment and asked if any of the other girls in the class had ever kept diaries.  Several had.  She went on gently to suggest that writing a poem might be - in some ways - similar to keeping a diary.  A poem might distil an experience, an emotion, a feeling, in the same way that writing a diary entry could preserve a moment of the past.  Comprehension dawned on my new friends' faces, and I too had learned something.  In some odd way, one of the reasons I write is to preserve life, to create life, to shine light into the dark.  


Original Photo from North Wales Caving Club

Looking-Glass Land

I was sitting in my upstairs writing room (the tiny spare bedroom) when I saw one of our cats – the black one with the white shirt-front – trot purposefully across the road, down my opposite neighbour’s drive, and disappear into the hedge.

I found myself wondering what tales a cat could tell.  Do they construct narratives for themselves?  What does life mean to a cat? For cats lead very different lives to ours.  We hardly even live in the same house. From down on the floor, things look utterly different. The functions of objects are not the same for my cats and me.  I don’t walk on the table (neither should they, but they do); I don’t sleep on the stairs; I’m not desperate to lose myself in the garage, I'm not interested in what’s going on under the kitchen sink.  When I go out the back or front door, I don’t tense and look carefully about for enemies. 

I don’t know what my cats get up to when they go out, but I suspect it’s adventurous and epic, with dangers everywhere.  Cats that go outdoors are never bored.  And what must it be like to go up trees the way they do?  We were pruning the apple tree a few weeks back, and I realised how very much higher it feels, at the top of the ladder, than it seems from the ground; and how very different the garden looks from up there.

 

I suppose you remember it was the black kitten’s fault that Alice went through the Looking Glass?  It wouldn’t fold its arms properly, and she held it up to the mirror ‘that it might see how sulky it was –

‘and if you’re not good directly,’ she added, ‘I’ll put you through the Looking Glass-House…
‘Now… I’ll tell you all my ideas about the Looking-glass House.  First, there’s the room you can see through the glass – that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.  I can see all of it when I get upon a chair – all but the bit just behind the fireplace.  Oh!  I do so wish I could see that bit.  I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too – but that may be only pretence, to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold one up in the other room.’

Let’s stop for a moment and just reflect (pardon me) on how sinister (sorry again) Alice’s chatter actually is.  She’s not even stepped through the looking glass yet, but she’s already come up with the disquieting notion that the people who live there are NOT us; and that they may be deliberately deceiving us.  It isn't her own reflection holding up the book in the mirror, but a mysterious ‘they’.  (And a nice bit of observation on Lewis Carroll’s part:  the looking glass is on the high mantelpiece: Alice, as a little girl, is not tall enough to see herself in it: if she holds a book up over her head she can see the reflected book, but not the person holding it.)

 

Alice continues:  ‘You can see just a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond.’

And, of course, it is.  ‘What could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but all the rest was as different as possible.  For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fireplace seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney piece…had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.’

People – adults as well as children – often ask writers the dreaded question, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’  It’s so very difficult to answer because a lot of the time, we don’t actually know. But I’ve evolved an answer. Fittingly, it’s in the shape of a story.  Some years ago on a book tour I stayed in a Manchester hotel, and my room overlooked the windows of a derelict building across the street.  Because I'm a storyteller, I immediately imagined a face in one of the broken windows, looking back at me.  Who might it be?  A ghost?  A fugitive?  A member of a gang?  Somebody from the past?  An alternative me?  And any one of those choices would lead to a different story.  

My ideas come from that hop across the street, that quantum jump that takes me out of myself into a different place, to see the world from a different, slewed angle. They come from Looking-Glass Land.