We all have them. They attached themselves to our curious minds and tucked into brain winkles with their slippers and PJs on. For young readers today, maybe they’re wearing Snuggies.

Think back to your childhood, to that moment you marveled, you wondered, your tear ducts opened, or you held your breathe in suspense. We all have that one book that did it for us, that one book that made us view the force of words in an entirely new way.

The aroma of imagination can sometimes smell like Hawaiian sweet bread and cranberry stuffing, Thanksgiving turkey, and homemade apple pie. Today was a blissful day as I prepped my recipes for my family’s Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. It wasn’t just blissful because I was avoiding the papers stacked up by my desk that needed to be graded, but it was blissful because I’m pondering a new book. What better way to brood and mull than while thinly slicing and layering apples into a perfect Thanksgiving pie?

Isn’t it weird how characters can take control of a project, and you as the writer are suddenly just a tool in process of creation, like a brush in an artist’s hand? This has happened to me many times through the years, but most recently on a revision of my thriller manuscript. There were a few tweaks I planned on making, but as I reviewed my pages, strengthening and tightening my prose, my characters unexpectedly began to flirt.

Now I will sadly admit that a hectic year hasn’t allowed me to read many 2010 book releases. I’m still catching up on 2008 and 2009, as well as working on the biggest release of 2012 (a writer can dream, right?).

(My opening remarks for the 2010 James River Writers Conference: http://www.jamesriverwriters.org)

There is a certain pleasure in dragging your fingertips across discarded tomes, wondering who were the owners?; what drove them to this book?; what passages enamored them, brought them insight or fury?; how did the characters inspire them?; or simply, why did they throw these old pages away? I went thrifting over the weekend, and I had a great find.

Move over, iPod, iPhone, and iUniverse. What’s the talk of Apple this weekend? It’s all about writing, voice, and emails.

There is that moment when the final sentence has been typed, where the writer sits back and basks in the glory of accomplishment. The seemingly impossible has been achieved. Where others have failed, you have succeeded. The project that gave you sleepless nights, that made you feel schizophrenic when your characters spoke to you, that sometimes produced a drug-like state where words trickled off your finger tips onto the keyboard like you were a tool in the process rather than the creator – that project, your novel, is done. But is it really?

In a time where sophistication wasn’t measured by the size of one’s flat-screen television or the apps on a smart-phone, the library was where one proved one’s merit. In my travels, the library of the Festetics Castle in Keszthely, Hungary mesmerized me and put my own personal library to shame.

Summer is nearly upon us, and though we may not be in school anymore, the siren’s call of the summer vacation pulls at us like a memory of the students we once were.

When we travel, we as writers have a different perspective than most. We are students of humanity, explorers of cultures with a magnifying glass and an archeologist’s brush, and eavesdroppers of the world’s tongues. Writers don’t just go on vacation. We go in search – in search of what exactly may differ between us, but adventure, romance, character, scene, perspective, and mystic are all editing tools of the travelling scribe. Our familiar worlds and words are left behind.