People.

I've come to the realization that I love people. All of them. Mostly as characters, but also as real-life, breathing things that have their own stories and unique reactions and lives that they live. It's most definitely one of the reasons I love being a writer. I get to incorporate the true life people around me and shift and mold them into new beings. I want my characters to feel real, to have compelling reactions to the shit I throw them into, and see if they can make it out.

I can't do that with real people, but I can sit back and watch it happen to them. That control might be gone, but it loses none of it's compelling nature to me. This goes from the most saintly of people down to the most demonic. I might not actually love those who are evil, but I'm still interested and compelled by them and their actions. I have never gone through a single day in my life without having a reaction to something, someone, did. I'm willing to bet that you haven't either. For better or for worse.

And that's why I love writing and movies. I want to capture all that stuff that's around me. Make up new and entertaining stories for  my characters, and just watch it all happen. The best part is that nobody really gets hurt in my text or in my films, and that is the separation we all need. That's what keeps us in books and watching three hour movies. We get all of life (sometimes more than, in the case of Dead Oaks or any other science fiction piece) condensed down into awesome snippets without all the real, brutal, heartbreaking consequences.

The more real the characters though, the more we're emotionally affected by those consequences. That's our goal as creators and storytellers -- but to never breach the feeling of relief once we all realize that it wasn't real, and that everything is okay for the people playing the roles or the characters gracing those pages. We can always rewind, we can always flip back to page one.

That's something life really can't give us, is it?

I love writing. I love characters. I love people. And life is the most interesting thing I could ask for to inspire me.


B