My wife doesn’t do fantasy novels. Nor anything in the realm of unreality.

One time we left a theatre after spending three hours watching the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas – a movie that jumped through about 8 different time lines spanning hundreds of years – and when prompted to give her opinion on the multi-layered, interwoven, cryptic feature, she said the infamous word: ‘sokay.’

Not even proper English, yet a beautiful portmanteau of “it’s” and “okay.” The merits of the movie are another debate, but the merits of this response are beyond dispute. If you can sum up that with a single, non-committal, slug of monosyllabic reply – this sort of stuff ain’t for you.

I have always felt that finding someone you want to be with forever, if that’s your thing, is a matter of the heart and not the head. You want your heads to be in the same space as far as important life goals go: so, say, the value of education, raising children, political angle, career ambition, and if it’s cool to record your own nerdcore in the basement. Beyond that, however, the rest belongs to the heart – and the idea that you value someone not for what they like, but who they are. You know, as a person. My geeky friends can like what I like. If my partner does, that’s a bonus, not a criterion.

So for the tenure of our relationship (nine years in July) my wife has had no friggin’ clue what I’ve been talking about whenever I bring up Imbalance, its characters, its story lines, etc. No clue. Once in an effort to keep me awake while driving she let me get into detail about Purge of Ashes, but only with the disclaimer that tired as she was she was certain to forget it all by morning and I could not hold it against her. She knows there’s a guy named Orenzo. She knows there are further characters named Aronan and Avery. She knows it’s about soldiers and refugees. After all this time, that is the level to which the transfer has occurred – the transfer between art and love.

Not such a bad thing, really. Like mixing personal and professional. Besides, now that Purge of Ashes is being released April 5^th by Realmwalker Publishing Group, she will have to read it.

Please note that her distance from the project has not prevented her from frequently ‘correcting’ me on the pronunciation of ‘Asma’ Madrejingo.

JM