The Remedy of Reflection

Once upon a time I wrote a book. It was about kids and magic and Christmas. It was loads of fun to write and even more fun to share with people.
I shared my book with kids; little kids, big kids and kids, like me, who still believe in Santa.

A few days before Christmas, when the blizzard of excitement from sharing my book with everyone died down, I crept back home to my own family  and quietly wrapped a few presents and baked some Christmas goodies share with them.

As I sat through dozens of Christmas movies, sang along badly to carols and paraded the streets every night to ooh and ah at the decorated houses, lit up like...well...Christmas trees, I realised what a brilliant thing my little book about Christmas was part of.

Kids jumped with glee when they recognised a familiar line, idea or concept shared by the wider Christmas audience. Christmas is after all, more or less, universal.

PS Who Stole Santa's Mail? formed part of the magic, the spirit and the sheer wonder of a time of the year which represents a billion different things to a billion different people all over this planet but mostly just draws humanity together for a brief, uber jolly period of time.

I didn't quite realise it at the time - book launches are rather hard work - but I was very fortunate to be part of the spirit.

We are only a few months into this new year. But already, it's nice to reflect on the past magic moments. They happen with imperceptible speed and stealth. They disguise themselves in mundane 'ordinariness'. They are often delivered by people under 12 and they rarely shout out, "Look at me."

They might be hidden in the pages of your new book; the one you are writing or the one you are reading.
They could simply float by as a butterfly on the breeze after a storm or appear out of the blue like a newborn's first smile.

However you happen upon your magic moments, make sure you take time to marvel them because they seldom occur in exactly the same way twice and they are the elixir of life. For me anyway.


So this is not the end.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Goldfish Boy

Image
Twelve-year-old Matthew Corbin is your regular pre-teen boy living in an unspectacular cul-de-sac deep in British suburbia. The major difference between him and the other inhabitants of Chestnut Close however is the state of his red-raw hands and tortured mind and the fact that he barely steps outside his terraced-home second story bedroom. Matthew is afflicted with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD and can barely function as a result. From his fishbowl vantage point, Matthew keeps track of his neighbours, dutifully recording their every movement, their comings and goings, and their habitual rituals in his notebooks. In this way we are introduced to the residents and their characteristic irks and quirks from the get go in a way that is both intriguing and comical. Matthew’s observations allude to his condition; he is both analytical and detailed in his approach. The orderliness of his notations suggest a mind used to repetition and accuracy, an intense desire to ‘get things r...
Read more

Review: Detention

Image
Tristan Bancks signed my copy of Detention with a note hoping it kept me turning pages . This book lived up to that promise and then some. Packed with page-turning tension and relentless drama, this is one middle grade novel that may cause a few kids to miss their dinner call. Yet despite the raw gritty urgency that suffuses nearly every page and the elevated sense of dread and desperation that keeps your heart in top gear, the pace is never too manic nor too hectic to enjoy the energising mix of edgy excitement and sincere emotion Bancks does so well. Dan is an inner suburban boy living on the outer perimeters of life. He’s classified as trailer park trash because of his permanent residence at the social-economically deprived Midgenba caravan park. It’s a title that comes with an ineradicable smear of hopeless. Deep down though, Dan’s a good kid, a caring kid. The type of kid who’ll risk his own face to save a vicious dying dog, which he does one day after finding Rosco tied ...
Read more

I've got a dream

Image
Almost a decade of moons ago, I made a serendipitous discovery that forever altered the spin of my world. Falling pregnant after so many years of waiting and yearning was nothing short of miraculous (for me) and a life event definitely worth waxing lyrical about. But did I? Sadly, not as much I as wanted to. There are those who find it hard to exist without sharing the contents of their dinner plates with the rest of  the world, then there are others who worry that a beautifully executed birthday cake photo shared on social media will somehow demean the starving populations of the world. I oscillate between the two but tend towards the latter, always fretting over how others will take good news in light of their own current situations and struggles, thus resorting to a severe downplaying of my own good fortune. The pregnancy of my first child should have been a joyous occasion - it was a joyous pregnancy after all - but I was acutely conscious at the time of another family me...
Read more