After a five week holiday hiatus, I return to my blog. They say everything in the publishing industry tends to slow down or stop for a while around the holidays. A much needed break for everyone. I was no exception.

I wouldn’t say I had a break, per se, but my writing did slow down for a while. It was a combination of family fun and obligations, the fact that I just happened to be at a difficult part of my work in progress, and just that end-of-the-year fatigue and ennui that besets us all. Another year gone. We made it. Happy New Year!

I’ve been doing a little reading lately, including a re-read of Neil Gaiman’s “Books of Magic.” I’m not a fan of the fantasy genre in general, but the master of any art is worth experiencing, and perhaps studying. Part 1 of 4 of that work, “The Invisible Labyrinth,” contains one of the best quick strolls through the history of the occult that I’ve seen. But it’s Part 3, “The Land of Summer’s Twilight,” that haunts my mind tonight.

That’s the part where the main character is taken on a tour of “Fairyland.” Whether it’s a Gaiman story, or Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” or any other attempts at magical fiction, the most important thing to remember when reading about faeries is that everything is a metaphor. Therein lies the power of such stories. Certain human truths are best explained in the language of metaphor.

It occurred to me the other day that writing books is my version of adventuring through Fairyland. One of the common tropes of these stories is the difference in the rate of time’s passage between magically-interlinked worlds. A year’s time in our world equates to the passing of centuries in Narnia, for example.

My first novel, Burn Card, takes place over the course of six days. From the beginning of my outlining and research, to the moment I typed THE END on the last page of my first draft, I had spent about 21 months. That’s about a 100-to-1 scaling of time, between the real world and the parallel universe I’ve created. Not time lost. Time well spent.

But quite a loss of time, when you think about it. My literary life is a burning fuse next to a ticking clock. A flower growing in a sunny grove within the deep dark woods. The song of passing geese amidst the howling of the eternal wind holding them aloft.

The most metaphory metaphor in the metaphoresque realm of metaphoriness. Pass the lemon sherbet, please.

And what’s most important — it was worth every moment spent.