...continued...

I think most writers can credit their creative abilities to their inner-child, and their sense of removing themselves from the confines of reality and its rigidity. Especially fantasy writers. Because what we come up with, what we put down on the page is exactly what we wanted to see or imagined as kids. Man, I always had dreams about moving statues. I’ll always remember a nightmare that haunted me for years about a curfew-keeping statue that hunted truant children on my block. Still gives me chills. When I wrote The Man with the Stone, I used aspects of that dream to promote the chilling reality of a humanistic statue blurring the boundaries between the real and unreal. And it just made me smile, because I could see it, the same way a child can picture the face of the boogeyman just by its name’s very mentioning. Because everything I wrote down was happening simultaneously in my head. My story became the harbinger of dreams. What I wrote that night was what I dreamed about after. It was like watching the dailies during movie production, and it was so unbelievable…so undeniably refreshing. Here I was creating something with real grounding. So real that the words had certain movements and pictures attached to them. It was the sensation you get while reading a really good book.