You are, the real you. Not the face you put on for public consumption, not the one you want to see, the one that is. Do you see it? Feel it staring back at you? If so, now comes the hard part.
My wife, Victoria, uses the phrase to describe an act of will, a decision to be honest with yourself. A concept I find admirable and strive to emulate. It crops up again and again in my fiction, an implacable theme. Why? Because like many of my heroes I believe it is the writer's job to do more than entertain. A good story should reflect who we are and the world we've made in our image, address the good, the bad, and the ugly. There's light out there and some of it comes from us, but there's darkness too, springing from behind the images we project, or seeping around their edges. We do good and we do evil and a hell of a lot that's somewhere in between, and if we hope to ever get it right, we have to look at it all and say, "Yup, that's me."
So the concept infuses the stories, because all good stories since the dawn of time are the back of the mirror. They see us. They speak, and what they say is brutal, even when it's beautiful.
Especially then.
SR
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