When I was a child, I used to tell myself stories. Apparently that’s not as unique as I thought it was at the time. It made me feel like some kind of special creature, apart from other people’s strange reality, that I could disappear into narrative at a moment’s notice. Mostly I was telling the stories from a third-person narrator point of view; my protagonist was usually male, because I really had no idea how a female person could be a hero. Very few of the books I read ever allowed a woman or a girl to be properly adventurous, and even in the English ones (Swallows and Amazons, for instance), once girls grew up they were supposed to turn into quasi-mothers. I didn’t want to turn into someone like that. My stories were sexy, adventurous, and exciting, and I retold them again and again, altering details, reliving the story like a favorite book. I also re-read books I liked, of course. And I drank.

I got through most of school and life that way until some time in my twenties, when I gave up drinking, figured out how to be a human being, and lost the ability to disappear.

Oh, I still told myself stories. But then I wrote them down, and turned them into books.

Last night, what with the asthma treatment, the steroids, the inhaler, and the expectorant, I lay in my bed not properly asleep and not properly awake. If I get to a certain point of being awake, I know to get myself up and go do something, but the half awake state doesn’t let me think that way.

Instead, I told myself a story:

I looked at the house in the clearing, and all the officers walking around poking at things, going in and out of the doors, and talking to other officers as they arrived. Apparently there was no help for it; I had to leave. I set off into the tree-swamp, walking back far enough to find the wood-slatted rope walk that shadowed the road. The walk was anchored by stripped and cut trees, sunk deep into the shifting ground. Sunlight filtered through the black needles of the evergreens. The water moved slowly beneath the bouncing slats of the walk, and the ropes creaked; I could see patches of sand and leaf litter, shifting slowly in the honeyed current. I was leaving my mother’s house; she had left the world without me, and I was on my own, but that wasn’t as bad as it could be. Bad enough. From time to time, I passed marsh-dwellers: A woman with her hair pulled tightly back, her face pale and pinched, her clothes worn and faded, leaning over ankle-deep in the marsh catching fish with her fingers. A man with long gray hair, his lips folded over his gums and his chin sticking out, picking up twigs. Neither of them noticed me, because nobody ever noticed me any more. I wasn’t quite sure when I had become effectively invisible, but it must have been a while ago, or my mother and Sassia wouldn’t have left me behind.

Of course, the story I told myself is part of the book I’m currently working on; this passage probably won’t make it into the book the way it is currently written, but that’s normal.

It was always the details that made the stories so absorbing; over and over again, I heard the creaking of the ropes, smelled the spicy fragrance of the evergreens, saw the walkway shifting and bouncing under my feet, and wondered who it was who built these hidden walkways and why half the population of this odd backwater world lived deep in the woods away from civilization.

Eventually I got up and took a short shower and changed my sheets. I got about three hours of sleep last night. Maybe I got more. I don’t know if story time counts. I suspect it does.