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Living your fiction
Funny you should mention that. I said in some blog post on this site, years ago, that far more of the novel is based on my real-life experience than most readers would expect. I had this incident in mind, among others.
Since then, aspects of the book which were entirely imagined have come to life. H. P. Lovecraft said that this is an occupational hazard of writing horror fiction. I think it was Neil Gaiman who quoted him saying that, and Gaiman said his own life had confirmed it.
A few years ago, I was with my sister in hospital as she was dying of cancer. Blood was pouring from her mouth… apparently, profuse bleeding from the gums is common at that stage.
“She looks just like the cover image of Buddhism for Vampires,” I thought. I thought that was really funny.
You probably aren’t supposed to find anything about your sister’s dying funny, but I don’t think she would have minded.
Neverland
That’s kind of confusing to me… Did you really have this bizarre meeting or was it just your imagination?
Anyways, James’ comment reminded me of Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” and his/her profile picture along with his comment brought South Park’s “Imaginationland” to my troubled mind…
Are we all living inside a fiction?
Nix
Sabriel was my favorite YA series in high school. I was already a Nix fan for a few years; I’d first found Shade’s Children in the public school library years before, and fell in love with its bleak, post-apocalyptic, trans-dimensional setting.
My memory of one of Sabriel’s sequels, Abhorsen, includes a nasty argument with my girlfriend in the Subway restaurant where we both worked. It was fueled by the tension leftover from her own encounter with a schizophrenic homeless man earlier that day, a tension I was woefully incapable of navigating at the time. I had brought that paperback to work with me…at one point, she picked it up off the linoleum tabletop between us and mocked my taste in silly fiction!
Life imitates myth
Fascinating. I’m of course reminded of Phillip K. Dick’s experience of living out a minor plotline of one of his stories, after he had already written it. Then he told his priest, and his priest pointed to a remarkably similar incident in the book of Acts.
It’s always unnerving when some mythical/narrative pattern or other wanders out of its natural habitat in the human psyche and plays out in the external world.