I have quiet days on Twitter, where I read the posts, but don't say much, and then there are other days when I'm a "Chatty Kathy," commenting on so many things that I see. Shiny objects catch my attention and draw me away from writing. I don't fight it too hard as so many of these things lead to new thoughts for books and characters that I have yet to meet.
Today, I had a couple of wistful moments that I don't mind sharing in a blog. The first sprang forth from a link that I picked up from @HarperCollins. It was a link to a page filled with pictures of Writers and their Cats. I loved the page, because it was such a humanizing moment for a number of the authors that I grew up idolizing during college. These wonderfully dark and grainy photos of authors sitting in the private sanctity of their homes with their beloved pets was so heart-warming. You could see the simple places in which so many inhabited, their faces alight with wonder and love as they watched their cats. You could see it in the way some of them held their cats, or relaxed with their cats as they worked. So many great brains churning away on the human problem while at peace with their felines.
My thoughts then hitched on many of the Beat writers that were pictured and my love of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road". And suddenly I wanted to read the book all over again, something I hadn't touched since I was in college. My mind kept spiraling, and I soon wanted to go through my literature classes all over again. I missed sitting in a classroom, pouring over the intense wording of books and poems, wondering at their meaning and the consequences of their arrangement, the curious thoughts about the society that brought those words together and the impact those words had on society. I longed to go back to some of my literary pursuits and my own literary novel that I am constantly putting on the backburner.
And then the urgency fades just a little as I realize that even in the depths of a college classroom with mountains of wonderful books around me, my own characters and dreams would not dim. My mind would drift back to daydreams of magic and horror and things that creep out in the night. At the root of it all is just a love of writing. Romance, paranormal, literature, horror -- to me it is all the same intoxicating drug that leads to dreams of what could be.
Even in the depths of frustration when a story refuses to move forward, my mind is always lost in the land of "what if?".
The second fancy to catch my eye was a little quiz posted by a friend. The quiz lists 30 quotes and asks you to name whether Batman or Shakespeare said it. Sadly, I did not score too well. I don't think it was so match a matter of not knowing my Shakespeare, but more of a biased love for Batman that made me hope that the Dark Knight was more elegant in his speech than reality allows.
I could go into verbose detail on how deep my love runs of Batman, but I will try to save it for another post. For now, I would rather tie it back to the ramblings above and an idle dream I have. When I started actively reading Batman, I purchased a trio of anthologies filled with stories from authors, who, for all I know, have never written a word in the Batman canon, but were able to create such magical tales that I was enthralled. It also gave me hope that I could one day pen a published tale of Batman, whether it be for a comic book or an anthology, it didn't matter.
I want to add my voice to such an amazing history of storytelling, walking with a character that has such wonderful depth. I've written my own fan fiction of Batman that will never see the light of day, but I can dream.
For the curious, here are some of the anthologies that got me started reading Batman.
Tales of Batman
Legends of Batman
Adventures of Batman
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