Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.

God is wild; I am tame....Night falls and an age ends....We call and are answered through the thick foliage, by voices too strange to be our own.

Why were my visitors so secretive, hiding themselves behind my consciousness. I could only conclude that they were using me and did not want me to know why...What if they were dangerous? Then I was terribly dangerous because I was playing a role in acclimatizing people to them.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death...I died and a wild animal appeared in my place.

I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.

Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen - that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we're still praying to their gods.