Writing as a time machine.

I've never heard this described before by anyone else.  Maybe it only happens to me.  Maybe it only happens because I write so prolifically.

It's been almost a year since I got very serious about writing.  In that time I've written a number of stories -- I'm a little embarrassed to say how many, suffice it to say that I've been very busy.

Anyway, it's a truism that as you get older time passes more quickly.  How I notice this is remembering an event in my past and thinking it happened only a short time ago, only to find that it happened way further back than I thought.  Meanwhile, when the new year turns it seems like you have a a whole year ahead of you, but a short time later, another year approaches.

I'm having the opposite temporal reaction to my writing.  It seems like ages ago that I went to Newport and holed myself in a motel room and wrote The Reluctant Wizard.  But it was only last September -- not even a year.  Then I started Freedy Filkins, International Jewel Thief; then Death of an Immortal...and so on.

I think what's happened is that when I'm immersed in a fictional world, it seems like a great deal of time is passing.  Events are happening to my characters, entire stories play out.  I'm lost in this never-never land that somehow feels real.  I've spent months and years beyond my normal span.  I've lived a whole nother life.

It's a little like the stories about fairy, where a mortal wanders in and spends a few delirious days with the elves and then comes back home to find that many, many years have passed.

It's a kind of mental time machine.

It's not why I do it.  But it does seem to be kind of a side bonus.