I had the rare chance today to spend ALL day banging out another chapter for my book. And now, I'm thrust back out into the real world and I'm a little dazed. The prospect of cooking dinner is actually daunting.
Does anyone else ever do this? Get so lost in the world you've created that you have trouble coming back to the real one?
This is gonna sound stupid, but it isn't (really!).
When I was a kid (1950's), I was taking a tour of the US-Mexican border, conducted by a border guard, who was showing all the tricks smugglers use. Suddenly, from a distance, I heard my mother calling me for lunch.
The bubble burst, and I realized I was in my suburban New Jersey home, reading a Donald Duck comic in which Donald had taken a job as a border guard.
It was my introduction to the power of fiction.
Decades later, as an adult, I learned that "the good artist" (as all kids who read his work called him) was named Carl Barks. He'd invented the characters Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose, and others, and was the only writer/artist of funny animal comics to have serious collector interest. (If anyone would like to see a real master at work, inexpensive reprints of Uncle Scrooge, his masterpiece, are available at any comic book store.)
The closest I've come to that in adulthood is the novel, A Garden of Sand, by the late Earl Thompson.
Hmmm, this sort of wandered away from whatever the point of this thread is...
