Of course all that I said in Meet Eliste is true; it just isn’t the whole story (it rarely is). The whole story is that when I got all smashy with that conceptual hammer, I was working on orders from a cuttingly sarcastic inner voice that was very, very tired of being ignored. I’d been mentally stepping on my instincts and impulses for years. But when the sheer unhappiness of my circumstances could no longer be denied, I lynched my superego and turned back to that internal self, to the authentic me who was an individual, not a catalogue of expectations.

To say it was bumpy at first would be gracious. But it has been rewarding, because in my authenticity I have found facets of myself that I didn’t even know existed. And when I built the Oasis, those facets moved into the house in the Jungle. They grew and thrived in personality, giving me a practically direct line to my unconscious, instinct, and intuition.

And then other presences moved in as well. As to whether they are simply other pieces of my mind, or more universal archetypes finding personal expression, or something else entirely….well, that is up to you to categorize. We writers find that having characters that we interact with living in our heads is rather par for the course, so the truth of it worries me not at all.

The denizens of the Oasis often have things to say. I find it helps me to write about them to connect with them and hear them more clearly. All my posts about them and the Oasis can be found here.