Specifically she suggested that I share my experiences in writing Lisia, the main character she and I created together for the Wraeththu shared world novel, Breeding Discontent. From the very conception of our story, Lisia took shape as a vivid and unique character, an original har who surpassed our initial expectations.

In fact while we were still in the early stages of developing the story, I had a brief but vivid vision of Lisia in a dream. He was standing in a doorway looking at me rather curiously. And while writing the story, Wendy and I both had times when unplanned sections of text came into being simply because a new aspect of Lisia’s personality suddenly revealed itself to one of us. The same was certainly true with other characters in this and other stories as well.

From communicating with friends in the fan fiction community, I have learned that this is a very common phenomenon. The more a writer works on a character, whether original or from another’s canon, the more real that character becomes, until he is less a creation and more a familiar friend. Of course, the character is actually a product of the imagination of the author and often personality traits and details come directly from the author. But I prefer to think of this in the same way that parents pass on traits to their children. In fact, I humorously consider Wendy and I to be Lisia’s parents (just don’t ask which of us was the hostling) in that we’ve both put a great deal of ourselves into his creation, yet his personality is not specifically akin to either of us.

Although the feeling of parenthood is probably a unique metaphor for me, experienced, published authors have reported the same idea that when fed enough thought energy a fictional character becomes a real entity both in the mind of the writer and sometimes readers, as well. I believe Storm Constantine put forth the most beautiful and eloquent description of this phenomenon.

A tulpa is a Tibetan idea and is a term to describe a thought-form externalised into the world so that it has a kind of 'virtual' existence in our reality. I realised that, in some ways, fictional characters are, or become, tulpas, and these are my thoughts on it....

A tulpa is created by feeding a thought or an idea with energy and then putting a mask on that energy, a physical appearance. It's my belief that this is pretty much how gods are created too. The energy of the universe cannot be perceived directly through our primitive senses, and as humans find it difficult to work with formless blobs of energy, we tend to anthropomorphise it, give it faces and personalities, whether that's a patriarchal father god or a nurturing mother goddess. When thousands, if not millions, of human minds all feed the same thought form with their energy, (by believing in it), I think they actually give it a kind of external existence. It is so real, for so many people, that it becomes real. It is concentrated energy, fueled by intention, will and purpose. This is why we can petition god forms to work on our behalf, whether through prayer, worship or ritual.

Storm and many of her magickally-gifted fans have taken this concept a step further by performing a series of meditations to enlighten themselves about the dehara, just as described in The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure. Very recently, Storm suggested to me that I use this method to commune more deeply with our creation, Lisia.

Excited by the prospect, I conducted my first Wraeththu meditation ritual. Per Storm’s suggestion I used a modification of Flick’s ritual to summon the dead from Wraiths. She’d even suggested a couple of specifically potent times and dates for my meditation assignment. Eager to begin, I decided to start a day early and attempt to summon forth one of our more minor original Breeding Discontent characters — one who was more vague in my mind and giving me some definite writer’s block.

It didn’t exactly work. At least not in the way I’d intended. I won’t go into all the little details of my meditation ritual except to say that it was in my back yard around noon. I did get a sense of presence both from the dehar I called upon and from the character, but I didn’t experience any vivid visions or hear voices aloud as I’d hoped.

I did have some more vague impressions, however. I kept experiencing a vague pink tunnel in front of me and a strong urge that I needed to move through it in order to get through to the Wraeththu world. I kept willing myself through the tunnel - sometimes with success and sometimes not. At a couple of points I felt I’d lost the tunnel and was in a place of grey blankness and felt lost. Throughout this I was mentally calling to the har I was summoning and alternately asking and demanding that he hear me and help me through and perhaps meet me halfway. Then I heard a thump that was so loud and so near that it jolted me right out of the meditation and made me look. It had sounded like something heavy hit the ground, however nothing around me had moved and I couldn’t quite identify what the sound was. So I decided to take it on faith that it had somehow been the har, especially since the one other thing I had been visualizing at the end of the pink tunnel was grassy ground.

So I repositioned myself to face where the sound had come from and returned to my meditative state. I wasn’t seeing the pink tunnel then but darkness. In the meantime throughout the meditation I’d been having this instinct to bow my head and curl up my body. Then this knowledge suddenly occurred to me that my posture was like being inside a pearl. And then I had a sense of being told that I couldn’t be incepted because I was a woman; I’d have to be pure-born.

OK, the logic there is a bit flawed considering I was trying to contact a har and not be incepted. But I’d felt an instinct of reaching out to connect to the Wraeththu world by traveling through that tunnel and because I consider myself a relative outsider to the world of magick, I was looking at this meditation as an initiation of sorts. I accepted the metaphorical birthing concept offered to me and went on to sense that I needed to repeat the meditation everyday for however long it would take a pure born to hatch and only then would I be able to get somewhere.

I repeated meditation every day thereafter, but the sense of presence did not return. On the second day I sensed that perhaps this feeling of abandonment I was experiencing was a reflection of the abandonment Wendy and I had inflicted upon pearls in Breeding Discontent, so I accepted it. On the third day I perceived some odd insect-like chirping despite the fact that I was indoors this time and I’d like to think the bedroom I was in was insect-free. The sounds seemed odd and as I concentrated on trying to decipher them, it occurred to me that this might be the sound that would be produced by newborn harlings, perhaps hatching from pearls. Considering that the sounds were coming from all around me in different areas of the room, this again correlated to a concept from the story that Wendy and I had created.

On the forth day I found myself distinctly inspired with new ideas and personality nuances from both of the hara characters I’d been meditating upon. I expressed gratitude for this inspiration in my meditation and proceeded to finish the section of story that had been giving me such grief – my writer’s block completely overcome.

Was this inspiration a coincidence? Was it a product of magick? Or was it the natural by-product of days of focused meditation on the subject? No matter what you believe, I have come to accept that creative ritualistic meditation is a useful, rewarding tool for writers and that creation of a character is just as magickal as the physical creation of a human life.

I am patiently continuing my meditations and have faith that by the time Lammas rolls around, I will indeed “hatch” and gain a deeper communion with my own creations.