There was a time when paper felt like magic. As a child, I would sneak sheets from the supply closet at Wells Carey Elementary — not to draw, but to write. I didn’t yet know what I wanted to say; I only knew that blank paper called to me. There was something sacred about pen meeting page, about thought turning tangible, about watching my words leave a trail of ink that couldn’t be undone.
That was where it began — my obsession with writing. Not just the act itself, but everything surrounding it: the crisp fold of a letter, the smell of paper, the faint bleed where ink met the grain. A letter was deliberate. You thought before you wrote because erasing meant beginning again. There was patience in it, reverence even. Words had to earn their place on the page.
As the world moved online, I followed. In the early 2000s, the Internet was a mosaic of small, passionate communities — countless niche message boards devoted to every imaginable interest. I still filled my physical notebooks with sketches of stories, but those forums gave me something new: an audience. For the first time, I could publish what I wrote for thousands, even millions, to read.
Some stories were grounded in realism, horror so vivid that readers confessed they lost sleep after reading them. Others were immersive epics that spilled across worlds and pages, while some were written purely for laughter’s sake. Each story was an experiment in voice, in tone, in courage — and those early readers were my first editors, critics, and friends.
That spirit carried forward into my debut novel, An Enchanted Heart — a blend of epic fantasy, horror, and humor that early readers have called “an emotional rollercoaster that kept them hooked.” It’s strange to think that the same child who stole paper from a school supply closet would one day send stories into the world with a single click.
Read An Enchanted Heart on Amazon →
Now, messages vanish as quickly as they’re sent. We write only to delete, reply only to forget. The permanence of ink has yielded to the convenience of the screen, and in that trade we lost something human. A letter wasn’t simply about saying something; it was about meaning it. Even the waiting — the silence between receiving and replying — was part of the conversation.
Sometimes I miss that rhythm. The way a letter forced you to slow down, to weigh each word before giving it wings. I think about the letters I never sent, the ones that still live in the folds of my notebooks, and I wonder how many confessions the digital age has stolen from us simply because they were too easy to delete.
Maybe that’s why I still write. Because every story, every page, every carefully chosen word is, in its own way, a letter to someone I’ll never meet.
And perhaps that’s all writing has ever been: a correspondence with the unknown.
