Ripley Patton

Marcus, even in this darkness, I try to swim back to you.I swear, I do.

Marcus looked down. __h, man! This was my favorite shirt. Who tore it?_ he asked, trying to pull the ragged edges together.

Let__ just say, there__ not much of a moon out tonight,_ Nose continued anyway, __ut if Yale joined us, there would be.

My dad was nothing but a bingo call.

You know,_ he said, __.S.S. Piss Camp._ __eah, I get it,_ I said, __t__ just not funny.

I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.

...but I__ learned a long time ago that the worse things are, the more people lie about them.