I'm Going To Go Home. Everything Is

We Writers – And Especially Writers For Children, But All Writers – Have An Obligation To Our Readers: It's The Obligation To Write True Things, Especially Important When We Are Creating Tales Of People Who Do Not Exist In Places That Never Were – To Understand That Truth Is Not In What Happens But What It Tells Us About Who We Are. Fiction Is The Lie That Tells The Truth, After All.

I Looked At The World Of Books And Just Went, Oh My Gosh, If I'm Writing Novels, I'm On The Same Shelves As Jane Austen And Charles Dickens And Petronius - Whereas With Comics, They've Only Been Doing Them For A Hundred Years, And There's Stuff That Nobody's Done Before. I Think I'll Go Off And Do Some Of The Stuff No One's Ever Done Before.

It Occurs To Me That The Peculiarity Of Most Things We Think Of As Fragile Is How Tough They Truly Are. There Were Tricks We Did With Eggs, As Children, To Show How They Were, In Reality, Tiny Load-bearing Marble Halls; While The Beat Of The Wings Of A Butterfly In The Right Place, We Are Told, Can Create A Hurricane Across An Ocean. Hearts May Break, But Hearts Are The Toughest Of Muscles, Able To Pump For A Lifetime, Seventy Times A Minute, And Scarcely Falter Along The Way. Even Dreams, The Most Delicate And Intangible Of Things, Can Prove Remarkable Difficult To Kill.

Virginia Is The Place, Where, Technologically Speaking, They Will Burn People At The Stake For Possessing Such Things As Toasters.

There Are Only Two Worlds - Your World, Which Is The Real World, And Other Worlds, The Fantasy. Worlds Like This Are Worlds Of The Human Imagination: Their Reality, Or Lack Of Reality, Is Not Important. What Is Important Is That They Are There. These Worlds Provide An Alternative. Provide An Escape. Provide A Threat. Provide A Dream, And Power; Provide Refuge, And Pain. They Give Your World Meaning. They Do Not Exist; And Thus They Are All That Matters.