Once upon a time I was sharing my litany of sorrows and stresses when a friend asked me to imagine I could wave a magic wand and create things exactly how I wanted. What would that look like? Well my Dad was there and I knew he disapproved of fantasy which this seemed to be asking of me, so I spoke his words instead of my own. I said I spent too much time in my imagination which was probably why I was in the fixes I was in. But I took the question home with me and in spite of my good intentions I began to imagine. I imagined a number of solutions to my various problems. Pure fantasy on the order of winning the lottery but not so clich�. I chided myself for fanaticizing. But a part of me stirred in anger and said: If I had that magic wand I would create a world in which daydreaming was a respectable occupation. That seemed such a ludicrous concept I laughed. But then I had to ask myself what that might look like.

As an aspiring writer some thirty-odd years now, it instantly occurred to me: Published writers are respectable daydreamers. Ah, but what were they before they were published--before the rest of us were allowed to pay our respects at the cash register (or the library)? And here is where the years of reading about writers and reading writers writing about writing and reading psychology (and let�s not leave out watching Oprah) prepared me to answer: They were respectable daydreamers even if they were the only ones respecting their dreams, which they must have done or they wouldn�t have realized them. Light bulb!

Over the next several weeks I made a plan and began to implement it. The previous summer my husband had created a Web page to display some of my writing, but I never promoted it so it just sat there. I decided that I wanted to take responsibility for it, to become my own web mistress. And I wanted it to be more than just a place to display my work. I wanted to create a community of writers for writers, a place to get moral support to bolster that necessary self-respect. This concept came from reading in spirituality which is a close kin to creativity that when you give unto others even that which you perceive yourself to be low in it will come back to you threefold.

Was the dream big enough yet? Well, no, because I also imagined that I could grow this Website into something that could support me financially, get me off the SSI which was one of my major self-respect killers. This would be possible if I attracted a respectable number of visitors over a respectable period of time which would in turn attract the respect of advertisers and maybe publishers. I was envisioning an interactive literary journal. Now that�s a big dream.

So I declared my intentions to the Universe and set out to make it real. My husband tutored me in Web page design and at the end of July 1998 I posted a complete makeover of Joywrite. At the end of August I added its sister site, Joyread. And how did the Universe respond? With a gut-punch, to test my resolve. The first week of September our computer crashed. We stored my directory of 150-odd files for safekeeping on one of our Web sites, along with the password for retrieving them! It was locked away from me for 19 days. I had to face the possibility it was gone for good. All of my creative writing and two years of my daily journal--over a million words of text. It just so happened that I was reading, In the Meantime, that week and preparing a book review on it for Joyread. I was forced to create a temporary directory so I could keep working. I named it In the Meantime. (Thank you Iyanla) I declared my intentions undiminished by publishing the October issue. And what happened? Gut-punch number two. Our phone was disconnected for ten days in October. Easy to see that as proof I was disconnected from reality, since if you can�t afford to pay your phone bill maybe you don�t belong on the Internet. But I refused to let it disconnect me from my dream. I continued preparations for the November issue--as if& We got our phone back and the November issue is on track. This daydream believer is staying true to her dream but she�s really hoping things don�t always come in threes!