Unidentified footsteps on my road.

I'm trying to create fictional worlds that allow the reader to engage in a high level of escapism. For every world I have to fabricate, there's a separate set of considerations. Seeking a premise for those worlds outside my own experience while guarding myself against being tainted by external media is exhausting. I struggle mightily with the world building process. For every sentient set of creatures or folks there are anthropological and historical considerations that must fit snuggly with the fictional cosmology of the world as a whole.

This creative process is like a road.

The standard process of every task is that we start at the beginning. I'm fortunate to have so many folks willing to keep me company on this journey, but I have noticed lately that there are footprints on the road beside me... that I do not recognize. Even as I write this, I feel a profound sense of having done all this before. Like I dreamed the circumstances of writing these books long before I did them. I felt prompted to write this blog entry, and had a sense of it even as I wrote the first few sentences. I feel the same way about my marriage. I spent my adolescence and young adult life looking for a girl I dreamed about.

My T-Shirt and jeans girl.

We chase our dreams with such fervor we rarely look down to see who has walked that same road previously. Being me, I spend a lot of time looking down. Maybe I'm just paranoid. The more I look, the more I wonder who's footsteps lay beside my own. Would this be a good time for a pun about footsteps and souls? I'll refrain. So... poor me. I see something I can't understand so I just create around it, make sense of what's near it, give meaningless things meaning.

Conclusion: my strange sorrow fuels my creative ambition... and makes me forget that in doing what I do, I have to wear a plethora of different shoes?