When I get home from work, I can’t wait to see what games my preschooler and toddler have come up with.  More and more as I see their imaginations developing, I find myself pining for that unbridled creativity of youth, the kind that knows no critics, expectations, or cynicism.

Then I try to remind myself that experience has afforded me a deepening well from which to draw for my craft, complete with many forms of love, heartache, terror that has lasted weeks, the thrill of experiencing new parts of the world (with a profound appreciation for my place in it), and the privilege of being able reflect back on things with ever-maturing emotions.

It’s an expected tradeoff, I suppose.  But still, I wonder what sorts of worlds I could create if I could just couple the vividness of my imagination from before it learned self-consciousness with the writing skills and wisdom I’ve been honing in adulthood.  To do that in a way readers can enjoy and participate in is my ultimate writing goal, now that I think about it.