I know I have said this a hundred thousand times to you over the years, but your books have, multiple times, saved my life or at least my sanity. I have always been a creatively minded person, I was always drawn to fantasy and dragons and could figure out how to put my feet in “this world”. I always longed for God and for virtue. I longed to find saints. When everything falls short in real life as it inevitably does, it is stories that bring us back to truth. Looking at old catechisis books–they’re all stories. Stories of the lives of the saints. Stories from the Bible. Stories and anecdotes of miracles, of peoples’ lives being changed. Stories of missionaries, stories of martyrs. I’m reading a book about Father Desmet right now, who was one of the primary forces in the West with the Native Americans in the 1800s. History is a beautiful thing. I love how in your books you take your own stories, you take Arthurian legend, the Bible, extra-biblical tradition, the whole richness of salvation history and bring it to life.
I will probably say it a thousand more times and sit here and applaud your stories and what they have done for me and for others and continue to do. I’ve written so many novels but never done anything with them. I’ve thrown myself into creative writing environments, roleplay, whatever, taking ideas and playing with them, turning them, trying to bring virtue, and innocence, into groups of people and worlds where they are not–reading the writing of creative friends I see unbelievable amounts of despair. The whole theme is despair. We need fantasy and stories that do not despair. So badly we need them. I am trying all the time to write them, and feel, failing.
I feel like I belong nowhere, as even so many spiritual people are not creative sorts, and I have never, ever, seemed to have been successful in excising that part of my personality, no matter how hard I try. If it doesn’t have a spiritual outlet it takes a worldly one with worldly company, which causes me immeasurable pain as I don’t often feel strong enough to combat in such company the huge waves of despair, vice, and impersonalism.
Yet on I trod. Thank you for your books. They will always be a light to me. I still haul them around with me everywhere I go!!