What fueled wonder for you when you were a kid?
I just had a Twitter discussion with my friend Don Bentley (check out his debut release! LINK: Without Sanction) about C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He’d shared how he’d scoured his grandma’s house for years looking for a wardrobe. I was the same! Hoping to find a doorway to another world of color, adventure, and dreams.
Another one of my wonder-decisions was from a commercial where Juicy Fruit Gum grew on trees. I of course planted a piece of Juicy Fruit Gum, hoping desperately that in the morning there would be a large Juicy Fruit tree grown taller than our house with thousands of packs of gum hanging off the branches. I bet there were millions of pieces of gum planted throughout the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. (You can see the actual commercial in link above. Note of caution: you WILL be singing the song all day).
On a scary scale, when I was a child, we had painting in our dining room of a girl who looked like a young, but beaten down servant. Her ghostly pale face was the only illuminated part of the oil painting. In dirty browns, and deep black, the painting carried dark overtones as she held a broom disconsolately in her hands, a look of longing for another life on her face. That was the kind of painting that most definitely came to life at night. I couldn’t walk past the darn dining room without running by it at night, scooting past hoping desperately she wasn’t looking at me, or worse: not in the painting. Though scary, it definitely fueled my wonder! To this day, I refuse to have certain kinds of paintings of dolls in our home. It they have a certain look in their eyes: NOPE.
What fuels wonder for you as an adult?
I think we need more wonder as adults. It may be why I love my fellow readers and authors so much. There’s a special bond between us and I think it’s because books develop wonder in us. As an adult, if you’ve read any of my work, you’ll know right away that New York City fuels my wonder. That wonder is what made us decide to move there. I didn’t want to live in a place where I ended up living for vacation or only the weekends. Life is too short to only live for a few days here and there. The city itself creates that wonder, but I also love going to an art museum for a little while, walking through Central Park, doing something creative like a kid (climb a tree, sidewalk chalk, blow bubbles) and reading books with great world development (LINKS: Night Circus, Veronica Speedwell series, the Stoker & Holmes series, anything by Lucinda Riley…)