Thundereggs and bandoliers of bells...

It may seem laughable considering the sort of shite that I typically write in this blog, but I've concluded that I'm doomed to write an epic.
The epic elements simply won't stop appearing in my dreams... I would tell you about them, but to be honest, I am afraid to abbreviate or share any details for fear of losing them altogether. They have to be written in complete form and somehow (miraculously) interwoven into a cohesive whole. God help me, what an arduous process, but I'm starting to feel it's urgent... it's all building up and gaining momentum, and has been for years. Even weirder: lately I'm encountering all kinds of bizarrity in daily life that also demands to be included in the story, and I'm convinced that I'm running into this stuff for a reason. It all belongs.

I wanted to write one of those wry, witty postmodern novels that takes a character's mundane existence and makes it strangely extraordinary, but that's just not what my mind is inclined to produce at the moment, or possibly ever. My pockets are stuffed to the seams with epic elements--I seem to have spent all my life becoming equipped to write such a thing, but never fully recognized it until now. A childhood on horseback in the Oregon Coast range; reading books about Celtic shamanism; designing maps of imaginary places on rainy afternoons; bookshelves stocked with Le Guin and Tolkien and Lewis and L'Engle and Nix and Rowling and Konigsburg and Campbell and Spencer and Shakespeare; a house full of filial struggles; a strangely mystical aunt; an obsession with magical realism; encounters with ghosts in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse; training in martial arts and their history; education in English literature, folklore and mythology. It all adds up to something I never thought I'd write, but as it's been shouting insistently from the periphery for years, and I think it's time I confronted it.
The dream that I had last night is a good starting point.
Today I begin.