The Garden Maze

You emerge from the cottage feeling refreshed, holding your treasures. It is night now and the moon is full. You walk down the path until you reach the entrance to a maze.

This maze is a jovial place! A steam-powered robot is telling a funny story to an eagle in a frock coat. Friendly explorers with binoculars gesture for you to accompany them into the maze.

In the distance, you can see a hotel standing at the centre of the maze, on a small hill. This hotel fills you with anticipation and a sense of comfort. The windows in this house are full of light. Upstairs, people are working in quiet rooms alone, typing out fresh words of their own private stories. In the kitchen, many others are collaborating on the evening meal. 

This, you realise, must be the house of the treasure finders: these are the writers who have escaped the plot forest, at least for a time. 

You borrow one of the explorer's binoculars: there, on one of the high balconies, you see the ferret! That thieving mustelid is standing there, dangerously perched, still gripping your disk drive between its teeth, with some kind of cocktail sitting on the balcony ledge nearby.

"We must hurry," you tell your new friends.

You set off, descending into the garden of many routes. The moon is still low in the sky, so you know how to orient yourself, but still, the paths go on and on. Once you end up back at the start. You begin to wonder, as your companions give up one by one, if this maze is a metaphor for the general work and toil that creativity and art require, the inescapable effort that comes with making things well.

You push these philosophical thoughts aside and press on: you need to find the correct path through the maze. To complete the treasure hunt, and get your last reward, you must type in a new web address:

https://danieldavidwallace.com/WORD

Where the WORD is the fifth word in the talk description of the first "masterclass" session by me, Daniel David Wallace, on October 19th. The description is under the subtitle "About this talk." If you aren't sure what the right word is, you can always ask in the community forum. 

To find the word, go to the summit schedule, here:

(To clarify: the first word of the description of that session is "Daniel." The second word is "will." But you need the fifth word. In other words, if you needed the first word, you would now go to https://danieldavidwallace.com/daniel -- but you instead need to put in the fifth word.)

Good luck getting through the garden of winding paths!