Queen Julie, You're Not Ditzy!

Dear Juliet

You're not ditzy. Queenly, perhaps, but that didn't rhyme with dear and I wanted to remind you that you don't have to be perfect to be loved.

I always thought you were quiet, cute and sweet.

There.

So I'm due to get pummelled by the osteopath this afternoon, back on the job tomorrow, physio on the 11th and a victory lap at New Cross sometime. My leave's between 24th August-11th September, not sure if I'm going anywhere, such is life.

How are you doing?

Looking for a subject...

So your uncle worked for Mattel?

I've been there.

January 2024 in L.A., and my back had locked up over that nerve again. The osteopath had freed it but I wasn't in great shape. However he gave me some of the best advice I've ever had, which was to exercise and walk. So I made it on and off the plane, got into a sterile Travelodge south of Sepulveda, rolled painfully out of bed in the morning and walked across to the Metro at Mariposa.

And I found I was walking right past Mattel. Barbie was big at the time, and that got me thinking. I'd just revised the Dru Quartet, Amy Acker had been enthralled by Dear Miss Landau (partly wondering whether she could get a part in some version of it) at a comic-con in Telford and it made me start wondering...

Like Barbie in Barbieland, Dru had been stuck in some magical dumping ground since the end of Buffy. However, I hadn't developed the idea one iota in years. All that was supposed theoretically to happen near the start of Buffy's real continuation was that Dru would have been dumped in some dismal pit for forgotten characters for about five years, endlessly throwing a baseball against the wall like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, waiting for the signal from the real world that some chosen individual somewhere had started writing the story of her redemption...

So, thinking of Barbie, I augmented it, having other left-over characters from Buffy and Angel like Fred hanging around there with her. They'd know Dru was their ticket back to reality via her as-yet-unwritten story, and I imagined Cordelia ranting around telling a bemused Dru to do something.

The signal comes in when I start writing Roses in the real world, Dru is promptly sucked through a wormhole or something, unceremoniously dumped flat on her face on the floor of the train, dazedly grabs hold of me for dear unlife, and we're off! From an angle no one would expect, melding fiction with reality.

The oddest thing is that I can vouch for the fact that that's how it felt. I got my vampire flatmate (incidentally, as a spectral/fictional entity, sunlight wouldn't have affected her) who hung out at Thornwood Avenue and crossed America with me, and you know most of the rest.

It was good going over to Avalon and seeing where she lives now. I haven't been able to stay a night on the Queen Mary yet, but maybe one day...

Why don't you take a day off and go look at the Queen? The Metro goes to Long Beach. Take the A Line from Downtown, which oddly enough goes near a station called Avalon, and you're on the way to the Island of Dreams...

There are quite a few plot threads still out there, woven into many strange tapestries...

I hope that brightens up your day, my Queen!

Love,

James