I actually drew the next few pages quite a while ago, but this is the first time they’ve been seen in public.

Some background to this chapter: years ago, in real life, I attended a conference on the future of New Zealand creative writing in Christchurch – which ended up inspiring this chapter. It was actually a pretty interesting conference, with an amazing assortment of writers and academics of all sorts – authors of ‘literary fiction’ as well as children’s and young adult writers; creative writing teachers; book reviewers; TV scriptwriters; English professors, etc. There was plenty of lively discussion and inspiration to be had. Unfortunately, I was too deeply submerged in my own private despair at the time to get involved as I now wish I had. Instead I spent most of the time hiding away in cafes and in my hotel room, trying to write…

It’s funny. At the time it seemed like a particularly miserable week. But looking back now, I see that conference as pretty important for me personally – as some kind of turning point. I’m very grateful to Mark Williams for inviting me; I think it did me a world of good.

Anyway, the talk I gave at that real life conference ended up as an essay, The Perfect Planet, which was published in a book of papers from the conference, Writing at the Edge of the Universe – and can also be read on my old website.

Much of that essay deals with role-playing games, and I remember this guy coming up after the talk to tell me about his own history of playing RPGs. He said something very interesting, about how he eventually stopped playing them, because – as he put it – he’d gradually lost the ability to suspend disbelief. “It’s like I became too post-modern,” he laughed (I’m paraphrasing from memory, of course). “Perhaps we’re all too post-modern these days. Maybe what we need is a way to switch our post-modernism on and off at will?” I’ve thought about what he said ever since, and it’s seeped into much of what I’ve written and spoken about. I’d love to know who that guy was, and possibly to continue the conversation; so on the off-chance you ever read this – drop me a line.

And now an important disclaimer: needless to say, Sam’s experiences on this and later pages are not the same as mine. The same applies to the rest of this long story; although I have borrowed plenty of elements from my own life and am using The Magic Pen to try and make sense of various personal concerns, it is completely fictional. As will become abundantly clear very soon…

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