Welcome, Traveler

I’ve rewritten this opening too many times at this point.

It’s funny, really. You’d think someone who spends so much time writing stories would have no problem figuring out how to start a blog. But I’ve always found it difficult to write about myself. My characters: they’re interesting. They’re magical. And they don’t exist (at least, not in the normal sense of the word). But me? I’m not magical, I live an ordinary life, and I definitely exist.

…Hopefully.

What do you write about someone as boring as that? So here I am…staring at a little black cursor on a big white page, wondering what in any world ever am I supposed to write.

But I think that’s actually a good place to start.

Because every story begins with a blank page.

So why not begin this one with one as well?

I don’t exactly know what this blog will become and I think I’m okay with that. But I also know that writing can be very isolating. Most of it is done in the quiet of your room, in the safety of your mind, in your pajamas, with a coffee. And when you share your story with the world, all they see is the outcome of that lonely pursuit.

I guess my hope for this is to give you the story behind every chapter. To show you the life of the writer…not the product she wrote.

Because I promise there is one.

I promise I do have a life.

Though I think that sometimes that’s hard to remember when all you see is the book she wrote or the story she finished. But finishing a book takes two seconds. All you have to do is type The End and close the laptop. The majority of the story happened long before that. It happened before you ever picked up the book. Before you ever read the words I wrote.

It happened in the quiet of my room, in the safety of my mind, in my pajamas, with a coffee.

The story isn’t the words I wrote down. That’s the outcome of a tale I watched unfold over countless months. That’s merely the residue. The story itself is the moments when I accidentally stayed up till midnight, lying spreadeagle on the floor of my bedroom and watching the ceiling fan spin around and around and around…trying to fix a plot hole. It’s when I was deemed ‘crazy’ by my little sister after wandering around the yard aimlessly screaming at air. It’s when I stepped timidly off the edge of reality and somehow crashed safely into a completely different world.

That’s what the story is.

And that’s the story I hope to tell you here.

So…speak, friend, and enter.

God bless,

Elizabeth.