I was talking to someone about the creative process once and came up with some imagery for it. I described the initial phase as a kind of nebulous cloud; a haze that lurks around your head. It’s made up from the stuff of your life; here and there are vague forms, a ghost of a character here, a thread of story there. Here it all lurks, indefinitely, brewing like a dreamy storm for possibly years at a time. (You can’t do anything with this, it’s like trying to build a house with mist.) But then what happens? There seems to be a critical mass, an event horizon… suddenly those clouds are coalescing into something more substantial, and like a star birth, this fairy dust begins to develop its own gravity. The clouds start to fall into a ball before you, growing denser all the time, and out of the blue this thing is alive. Its edges focus and it begins to have a pull. Both like a seed and like a machine, it starts to have needs, make demands. Fuel me, service me! and you are compelled to tend to the thing as if it were a child. You do this as it coughs and splutters and cries, you do this until it starts to hum pleasingly with an energy of its own. Then it is independent, and free, and zooms away into the world, towards the horizon and leaves its creator far behind.