Maudlin

I went in sci fi, hoping for a chat to take my mind off the miserable thoughts in my head, but when I got there it was empty. Only myself for company. I was going to write a story, but I can't get the words to flow right. Guess I'm just not in the right frame of mind for pouring my imagination on to paper.
Imagination is a wierd thing...unreal people become like friends as you put them down, a couple of times I have brought myself to tears writing about the pain, heartache or even death of a character. Actually death is a common concept in a lot of my stories...you can't have a good, exciting tale without a good death in it. Unless of course you can wangle it so that it's not really a death, just an apparent death, then you can have a good, nice happy ending.
I don't believe in happy endings...the end is never really the end...in a story, at the end of the fight, or the battle, or if the couple make up, there is still all the sorting out to do for them...even if they are not really real, I think imagined characters rtake on a pseudo-life of their own, and people would wonder how they carried on after the last page of the book or the last sentence of the story. I know I do. What happens to the princess after she marries the prince...I doubt they live happily ever after...I bet they have arguments and falling out's like the rest of us, maybe she has lots of healthy children, maybe she is infertile and gets cast off for some othe brazen hussy that can have kids, maybe he dies in a freak hunting accident and she has to be queen reagent until her sons are old enough...you just don't know.
Stories are powerful tools, and have lives of their own...I know many people have said this, not least Terry Pratchett..he wrote a book about it, lots of books in fact. I kinda believe it tho in a toned down, half hearted way, because I don't BELIEVE in anything very much, certainly not God, hardly even in myself, but thats the way life is...to go through life not believing in anything really, means your head gets filled up with all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff that you can use to be creative. I' not even that good at that, but I'm practising, it's something I like doing, and if I practise hard enough maybe I will reach my goal of actually writing a book, one that is good enough to be published. Short stories won't do it, it has to be the full novel. I'll get there eventually I guess.