What is FCI?

It's my term for three of the most wonderful things in life:  fantasy, creativity and imagination. 

Life is a serious business.  We have to be deeply grounded in reality.  But life is also incredibly complex.  It’s made up of matter and the rules that govern matter, and it’s also made out of emotion, thought and desires that all affect one another in sometimes unpredictable and immeasurable ways.  In a complex world, FCI is one of the best tools to help us negotiate them all and find our place in life. 

My blog, Caution: Adults Playing, is where I take the misconceptions around FCI seriously, while having fun playing with them.  There is an oppression of young people, and an oppression of adults.  Like you can insult a man by comparing him to woman when you believe women are less than men, you can insult an adult by comparing them to a child because we believe children are beneath us.  The oppression of adults runs a little differently.  Adults are expected to sacrifice everything in order to be, or at least appear to be, capable and productive.  As such, you can’t be seen acting ‘childishly.’  Between the two oppressions, they account for most of the personal and societal pressure to cut FCI out of our lives just when we need it most: to counteract the wear and tear on us from the burdens of too many routines and over-responsibility.  Just like we don’t have to adhere to a list of attributes attributed to our gender, we don’t have to go from being a child to leaving everything from childhood behind in order to become an adult.  

In my writing I champion and explore the benefits of using your FCI.  And I write my stories using all three. 

My first book, What the Faeries Left Behind, is an urban fairy tale in which Abigail Watson—stuck in a rut—is given an unexpected opportunity to allow FCI back into her life to help rejuvenate it.  My second book, Defense Mechanisms (coming out later this month), is also an urban fairy tale.  It’s the story of how thirty something Janey was bullied into giving up FCI growing up, and what it takes for her to reclaim it and give herself permission to be her real, whole self.  And my third book, Sleepwaking (coming soon) is a modern adaptation of Through the Looking Glass that takes us back to Wonderland—an urbanized version of it with an adult Alice—because the satire, word play and innocent fun that delighted us as children can be just as refreshing and stimulating for us as grown-ups. 

I’m launching Deep Meaningful Fun:  Defense Mechanisms, an urban fairy tale—a Kickstarter campaign for the release of my second book—on June 24th, 2013, to run for the next three weeks.  As an author/artist I’d love to connect with more people who relish their FCI and want to read more fun fiction—deep, meaningful fun fiction that is.  Participating in the campaign is like ordering an advance copy of my novel and getting backstage passes to the behind-the-scenes world of writing and publishing a book. 

And come to www.ambermichellecook.com, the gateway page to more of my FCI:  my Wubbulous Writing Website, the blog, and Chromatic Daffodil Shadows.