“This is for everyone who has ever looked at the stars, or gazed from atop a hill, or across the sea and wondered…” 
~Tim Perkins, Worlds End: The Riders On The Storm

I’ve had some health issues lately and my system hit overload.  To top everything off I was leveled with a bad cold, a man-voice that echoed in my own ears and the energy level of an anemic slug.  Yeh, so not pretty.  I crawled home from work with the sole purpose of collapsing on my couch and pretending I was still alive.  My youngest asked me how I was feeling and I said without any pause to think – I feel like the starship Enterprise that has had to reroute all systems to basic life support.  Non-essential functions are temporarily off line.  Bless her, she didn’t even miss a beat, just shook her head, laughed and jokingly called me a nerd.  She also went to make me a cup of tea.

That brief conversation stuck with me because describing how I was feeling in that odd way really does sum up a lot about me.  I am a dyed-in-the-wool SciFi fan and have been since I discovered The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key when I was in the 6^th grade.  My imagination was hijacked. I devoured that book.

When Star Trek came along I was entranced by the possibilities of space travel. The fact the Enterprise was inhabited by Kirk, Mr. Spock and Bones didn’t hurt either.  I regularly fell in and out of like with them.  Through the  years I have read countless books, watched the majority of SciFi movies and regularly take a side trip to English TV and Dr. Who.  When I wrote my first book it was inhabited with men who planet hop.  No surprise there.

I am also blessed with a friend who doesn’t blink an eye at any of this.  Of course, she is also a writer and dwells in that strange landscape of a writer’s mind where many of us reside.  Who else is going to turn up for coffee wearing a Dr. Who t-shirt to celebrate the 50^th anniversary?  She and I discuss space travel, magic and difficult characters with aplomb.  We jump from subject to subject and then back again without missing a beat.  We tend to laugh a lot.  From the outside you would probably not even realize what we are so earnestly discussing.  If you did, you just might want  to join in the fun.  Resistance is futile! (sorry, I couldn’t resist) 🙂