The other morning I sat in the pre-dawn darkness on my porch, wrapped up against the cold, staring at the stars with their piercing, distant magnificence. I listened to invisible raccoons running through the trees, saw the inky outline of the branches bending under their weight. I heard the soft clopping of deer hooves, and then the owl’s resonant, echoing call in the middle distance.

The life of a writer is not as glamourous as you might think; it’s not all sweatpants and eating dry cereal out of the box and royalty payments stuffing the mailbox. This morning, for instance, I awoke from a spicy little dream and stared into the dark thinking about the dream and what it meant and trying to drag out the good feeling for as long as I could.

Five hundred years ago cartographers, imagining what lay beyond the known borders of the earth, poetically wrote that beyond a certain point in the uncharted seas “there be dragons.”  Dragons are the mythological, metaphorical expression of our innermost fears; the sea they inhabit our unknown future.