Tuesday, July 13, 2010

to start

as dylan thomas said, let's "begin at the beginning." i'm not sure what the exact beginning is in this case, but i think when i was a little girl is as good as any. i grew up in victoria, bc. i was a very shy child, but a voracious reader, and the books i read were a big influence on me.

when i was little, i didn't actually have a wardrobe, but i checked inside any that i came across (my granny's seemed an especially appropriate choice) for a snowy wonderland. i wished i could travel to camelot, and meet king arthur - i would be his bravest, most loyal damosel. i wondered what my daemon would be. and i know i'm not the only person who hoped and prayed for a letter to arrive by owl on my eleventh birthday.

as i grew up, i of course realized that fiction and reality are two different things, but that didn't stop me from wishing that the worlds inside my books - worlds of teenage runaways, bizarre and amazing places, brave orphans, girl detectives, secret worlds and gardens, gypsies and pirates, adventures and quests - were real. i know now, as an aspiring writer myself, that existing in books makes them real, but i wanted adventures of my own, private worlds and battles against evil.

so here we are. i'm 21 now, an age where you're not supposed to believe in the fairy tales anymore. i'm too old to be a teenage runaway, and not nearly wise enough to be a gypsy, but i'm not going to let that stop me. i've got a passport & visa, a camera, a notebook, and good music for long train journeys. i'm off to meet the uk, explore europe for two years, and make my own ordinary adventures.

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