"It's a kind of magic..."

I've had that Queen song running through my head for the last couple of days.

Maybe I've got magic on my mind.

The way I see it, both fiction and non fiction have their own kind of other-worldiness about them.  Like the song says, it's a kind of magic.

My typical pattern with non fiction is that I'll see a call for submission.  The posting speaks to me or not.  If it does, I pull open my mental filing cabinet to see what I have that might "fit" what the editor is looking for.  As I sort through the files, sometimes I notice things that might work for another story, some other time.  And that's okay too.  I'll access that file another day.  I choose my story, plucked right from the pages of my life. There's something very special about that.  Because it really happened.  Maybe my story will resonate with you, too.  So there's a universality of it even though this specific story is mine and is unique; the humanity of it connects us all.

Then there's fiction.  A whole different kind of magic...Usually the submission guidelines are looser than in non-fiction.  At least, that's been my experience.  So where does the story idea come from?  Who knows? One minute I'm walking my dog, the next moment I have a story idea.  As I write, it sometimes becomes an entirely different animal.  But really, when it comes to fiction, we all start with nothing.

And in case you haven't had enough ramblings about magic today, get this.  I was about half way through this blog when I noticed the time, 8 a.m., time to walk my dog.  Also time to take my pointsettia out of the closet (I've been trying to coax it to rebloom like I did last year, with no luck).

When I took my plant out, I spotted the tiniest new green "leaf" that has turned just started to turn the slightest bit red.  Now that's a kind of magic.  (Could this be fodder for a future Christmas story?)