Perspective

My father always told me that the real me was the man I was when nobody was looking.  The problem is that there is always someone looking.  Whether you call it conscience or the omnipotence of deity, there is always a standard that we hold ourselves to.  We have that line that we will refuse to cross.

The concept of language has always been a sticking point for me.  Placing weight on words as bad or powerful is another way of shifting responsibility to inanimate concepts.  A word is not bad by itself.  It's the insensitive idiot that has to use it because of a non-existent vocabulary that makes it bad.  The key to the propriety of language is in the environment and the company.  If I say something specific, it is because it is the best word for the situation and the audience.

Using words does not dictate who I am.  The actions and decisions that shape my life have shaped me as a person, a husband, an intellectual, and as a writer.

What flows from me into my books is the result of travel, experience, relationships, personal wishes, and imagination.  In fiction, the world can be as innocent or as jaded as I want it to be.  The problem, of course, is that too innocent or too jaded makes the story unbelievable.

That's kind of the point.

Reality is not what I see, or what you see.  Reality is the combination of perspectives at any given moment of every person involved in that moment.  Reality is the culmination of a shared experience.  Missing pieces give imagination and opinion a chance to thrive.  A good thought on this is to ponder the color blue... Seriously...

How do you know that blue is blue?

How do you know that I will see the same shade of blue or even describe it the same way?

That is perspective.