I’m not sure where this story starts. This love affair with fantasy books and games.
Maybe it started in 3rd grade, when I wrote my very first book, “The Black Flame.” This book was terrible, to be clear. It was a faithful transcription of my play through of the RPG game Realmz. I’d called my dad stupid and gotten myself grounded from the computer for a month. (A month!) This was my creative workaround. By turning the game into a writing project, that made it “homework,” and thus allowed under the terms and conditions of my grounding.
There was the time in 6th grade when I got assigned to 8th grade lunch. Nobody would let me sit at their table, so I too refuge in the library. Every lunch period I immersed myself in TSR fantasy. I must have read Dragons of Autumn Twilight a dozen times that year.
When I went away to college I wrote a ton, but it was for class, not for fun. One of my favorite projects was for an urban studies class on the narratives of space. I built an immersive text adventure game set in Coney Island as the park burns and collapses around you. I wanted to explore how the contours of virtual space shape choices, just like real-world environments. I don’t know if my teacher actually played my game past the first puzzle, but I confused her enough to earn an A.
Near the end of college, I explained to one of my favorite professors that I was pursuing a minor in computer science and learning how to build websites so I could get a good-paying tech job. This line always seemed to impress the adults in my life, but he reacted differently.
“That makes me very sad,” he said. “This means you will never write again, and that’s a great loss.”
Before that moment I’d never thought about writing as my calling. It was a pastime that I loved, an aid to deep thinking, an escape from my real life. But a desire to write wasn’t guiding my path. And by then it felt too late to seriously consider. I felt sad then, too. Like I’d closed a door on myself that I didn’t know about.
I promised myself it wouldn’t happen, but somehow on the track to building a career, making money, raising kids, etc. I lost track of my creative passions. My professor was right–I stopped writing. I also stopped reading, playing games, taking photographs, drawing mazes. And over the years as I’ve climbed the corporate ladder, managed bigger teams and budgets, and taken on the mantle of “mom,” two things have happened. My creative skills have atrophied. And, it’s become more and more terrifying to be bad at something in public.
But now here we are. The world, which felt so safe and stable in my childhood, feels scary and out of control. At the same time, my job is starting to drain my soul. My kids are getting bigger and they need me less. I need a hobby that isn’t doom scrolling the news.
And there’s this phenomenon of romance fantasy, an entire blossoming genre of beautiful escapist stories. I just want to fill my days with fantasy worlds. I want to wake up dreaming about fae and dragons. I need this fun and joyful thing for myself, so it almost doesn’t matter if the writing is bad. I think it will be fun.
This project feels scary and new, and at the same time, I suspect this story started a long time ago.