fanfic – Clementine Fraser

One of the most precious things to me has been the friendship of those who come into my life. Marriage breakup, work stress, self esteem issues – all have been made easier by the love of my friends. Our friends reflect us to ourselves. Often we have friends who serve different needs in us. We have the crazy friend, the sweet friend, the super awkward friend, the friend who loves super cheesy music and doesn’t care what anyone thinks (I think that last one might be me..)

We also have the friend who listens to us for hours when our hearts bleed out through tear tracks on our face.

The friends who laugh with us and comfort us are precious. The treasure that they are can be overshadowed by a focus on romantic relationships, despite the fact that romantic relationships can often end in heart-ache and true friendships tend to last forever. I’m sure we’ve all had that wonderful joy of seeing a friend after many years and feeling as if no time had passed at all. Friends love you even when they discover that you were the one who left the passive aggressive reminder note that they’re telling someone else about, and when you’re brave enough to tell them it was you they laugh for 10 minutes straight and then hug you. Continue reading “Friendship – in life and in fiction it keeps me going” →

Magic seems so real when you’re a child. The world is a miraculous place where caterpillars turn into butterflies and you’re taught to wish on stars. When the world is so full of possibility, the idea of magic doesn’t seem out of place. Magic explains the world.

I can’t remember when I stopped truly believing in magic. Maybe it was when i figured out that Santa wasn’t really real, or that the wishes I made on stars actually didn’t get heard. Of course, it might have been when that picture of the witch that I saw so vividly in my head looked like a green painted mess on the paper in my art class. Whenever it was that I figured out magic had no place in our world, I definitely remember my sadness and disappointment that I could never be a magic user, or visit magic realms where I would (naturally) suddenly discover that I was a long lost saviour bursting with magic. Like I said: disappointing. My desire to see magic actually exist was, for the most part, equally satisfied and fuelled by falling into enchantments in books.

Enchantments give our world some hope that things can not just be better, easier, more fabulous, but that there is some meaning behind the meaningless. Some sparkle to be added to the banality of existence. Continue reading “It’s a Kind of Magic” →