Is It Despair or Excitement Which Drives Me to Write in Today's World?

That’s an excellent question.  Those of you who have been following this blog know that I am a writer of speculative fiction.  This includes: Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Science Fiction and Science Fantasy. There may be some other subgenres which should be included, but I couldn’t remember them.  I write for the same reason I read; to escape. So I guess part of my answer to that question would have to be at least partially that I write out of despair.  

But instead of writing some dreary sort of claptrap like Franz Kafka’s in which the main character is turned into a disgusting pest that is almost impossible to be finally and fully rid of, I prefer to create a reality in which the bad guys are vanquished by a very idealized version of myself in a world (or space) where such things as getting rid of the bad guys are not only possible, but downright probable and plausible.  Here is where the excitement comes in. It is not a world of universe of black and white or even shades of gray, but a brightly colored landscape full of flowers and birds and other fantastical creatures. Having grown up at a time when most of the movies I saw were in blazing Technicolor, and the fact that when I dream, I dream in color. I’m always very conscious of the color something or someone is. The characters in my stories are often the brighter shades of the rainbow, going beyond black, brown brick red, golden, olive or pinkish-beige to blue, green, teal, cherry red, purple, or orange.  These are my alien characters, who have names I create with my Scrabble tiles. I once met a woman who really had blue skin. It was an after effect of a medication she had been given as a young girl to correct some physical condition she had had back then. She was Evangeline Walton, the author of four books I have in my library to this day, and we had a most interesting talk. I was working security to pay my way into a fantasy convention, and it was my job to keep her from being mobbed by her fans. She was charming and affable, and very easy to get along with. She was also very much an introvert, as I suppose most of us writers are, to a greater or lesser degree.  Writing fantasy or Scifi is by and large a solitary activity, and one must be comfortable staying by oneself for long periods of time. But the payoff is no one is teasing you, or tormenting you. No one is playing keep away with your property, as happened to many of us when we were young. We grew to value our own company, and the worlds and characters we created, because that made us gods and goddesses.  

So there is the despair and  the excitement.  The despair comes from realizing there are such cruel people in the world, many of whom either run the world or manipulate the world in order to subjugate and torment those whom they deem as lesser than they.  The excitement comes from realizing that the imagination is as big as the universe, and within it, one has divine powers to create, and like Shiva, to destroy whatever and whomever one Wills to.