It’s rather amazing to be an author. You really get to discover a lot about life, the world, Humanity, and so forth by seeing it through various different eyes, and by living so many different lives.

Take Christmas. America exports its “traditions” all over the world, corrupting things that really are old traditions. Bringing commercialism into it and all that. Here’s a fun thing though: ever thought about what Christmas might be like through the eyes of someone who only sees the commercial Hallowthangivimas trappings, but always heads across the Atlantic before mid December has come to a close?

I’ve really been learning how strange our Christmases must look to one whose frame of reference for the holiday is Italian, German, Austrian, and French (mostly Italian). In Ready or Not Salencia is staying in America for the Christmas holiday for the first time in her whole life. It’s the first time she’s seeing the things that she only actually knows from movies, television, and whatever gear up her friends’ families might engage in on the last stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year. Another first, ringing in a new year in the states, but one that’s pretty much universal for western society.

It’s a really great thing fiction. Reading it as well as writing; either way we find ourselves experiencing things, thinking things, discovering, learning, growing all because a little voice in our own or someone else started whispering little things, and then before long it has a name, and a story, and a following. Stories really are remarkably like the gods one meets delving into the fantastic Small Gods by Pratchett.

Anyhow, I wish you all bon nuit!
Love

Jaye