I have always loved the night. I have always loved the moon and stars. And until I was 17 I never really gave up on finding magic, even if it was only of the bending spoons, pick a card and I’ll read your mind number.
I don’t know why I felt so certain that there was magic. But I felt that way before I learned to read, I know that. I wasn’t one of your kid prodigies that learned to read before they go to school. I learned to read along with my first grade class, and I realized, vaguely that the keys to all the doors in the world had just been handed to me. And I began writing really, really bad poetry.
But I was still looking for magic. Any half-open door looked like maybe-magic to me. Any clearing looked like magic. Any archway, especially a highly-decorated one, looked like a place where maybe I would find magic.
And I was ready for it. When I was very young Gumbi and Astroboy were my “invisible companions”, like Hobbes is to Calvin, and I was ready to go anywhere among the stars or deep into the earth or on a balloon or floating island in the clouds. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the books I was now eagerly devouring were true (The 13th is Magic, The Narnia Chronicles, Knight’s Castle, Black and Blue Magic, Five Children and It, Knee Deep in Thunder, they just kept getting more complicated as I got older). I was just sure that some sort of magic would inevitably happen to me.
But it didn’t. It didn’t when I was nine years old, and nine was three times three, a very magical number, (as anybody who had read magical books could tell you), and it didn’t come when I was twelve, which was nine plus three and should have been the most magical of all.
At last I realized that magic wasn’t going to happen to me, not in the way that I had first expected—a winged horse, a unicorn, a land where everyone was made of flowers, or a kingdom that I could be discovered to be the long-lost ruler of (this was a favorite). But meanwhile I had found so much magic in books that it had all come together and I realized that I was already making magic for myself. “Gillian”—a story I wrote in junior high, illustrated and put in my drawer was eventually to be rewritten as part of the Night World series: Dark Angel. Elin and the Demon” was a story I wrote in high school about a girl who meets a very pathetic, sorry demon in the woods. I never did anything with that story, but there’s a little Elin in Mary-Lynnette of Daughters of Darkness. And Mirrors and Magic a novel length book that I began to write when I was in high school and finished (or thought I had) in college, was my first book.
My feeling was that there was a little longing for the darkness of magic in everyone. “The dark was more enticing than the day” was a frequent refrain in my poems. I still love the wildness of the night, and the things they’re finding out about dark energy and stars rushing away from each other as if they were being pushed, a universe that may have eleven dimensions and maybe more … that’s magic to me, just as a unicorn would be.