People have asked why I finally turned these stories into books instead of keeping them in my head.
The answer is simple.
There are other people like me. They deserve to see that they exist.
I needed to know that I existed too.
I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was eleven. Sometimes I was a player. Sometimes I was the Dungeon Master creating the world around everyone else.
The characters started small. They didn’t know much about the world yet. They had to survive, learn, make mistakes, and figure out who they were.
Over time, everything got bigger.
A town became a country. A country became a whole world. That world became part of a solar system, a galaxy, and eventually a universe. Some characters grew powerful enough to become demigods or gods.
The power wasn’t the most interesting part to me. What interested me was how their view changed as they grew.
A person living in a quiet town doesn’t see a war the same way a soldier does. A soldier doesn’t see it the same way a commander does. A ruler has to think about the people who will suffer, the countries around them, and what might happen years later.
They can all look at the same event and see something different.
That doesn’t always mean one of them is lying. Sometimes they just can’t see the whole picture from where they’re standing.
That idea stayed with me.
It became part of how I think about stories, people, and life. I’m always looking for the part that’s missing. I go back to the beginning and ask if I missed something. I ask what the same moment would look like through someone else’s eyes.
I’ve been carrying characters, scenes, desires, arguments, and whole worlds inside me for decades. Some came from games. Some came from my imagination. A lot of them came from real life.
Some came from a part of my life that I kept private.
Private doesn’t mean fake.
A person can have a public life and a private life, and both can be real. The world doesn’t need to watch every private moment before it agrees that the moment happened. We shouldn’t have to display every part of ourselves to prove that we’re telling the truth.
For a long time, these worlds existed only because I remembered them. If I forgot a detail, it disappeared. If I died, most of it would disappear with me.
That started to bother me.
Keeping the stories private protected them, but it also trapped them. No one else could enter those worlds. No one could meet the characters. No one could find a piece of herself inside them.
The stories couldn’t help anyone while they were locked inside my head.
Turning them into books changed that.
A book is something real. Someone can hold it, read it, put it on a shelf, and come back to it years later. It can remain after computers break, accounts close, and conversations disappear.
Someone who never knew me may read one of my books after I’m gone.
Maybe she’ll disagree with me. Maybe she’ll understand a character in a way I never expected. Maybe one sentence will finally give her words for something she has felt her whole life.
I like knowing that’s possible.
I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like the world had already decided what people like me were allowed to be. We could be fantasies, jokes, problems, political arguments, or somebody else’s idea of what our lives meant.
But we weren’t often allowed to simply be full people.
My books don’t ask permission to change that.
The characters are fictional, but the feelings underneath them are real. Their desires, mistakes, beliefs, fears, and ways of loving didn’t appear from nowhere. They came from lives that were actually lived and questions I’ve carried for years.
Fiction lets me tell the truth without giving away every private detail.
A memory can become a character. A desire can become a shared language. A terrible part of someone’s life can become the ground where she builds something beautiful.
A woman the world threw away can become a goddess.
The fantasy doesn’t erase the truth.
It gives the truth somewhere to live.
I don’t know who will find these books. I don’t know which ideas will matter or which ones readers will reject. Maybe someone will take one small idea and use it to make something better.
That couldn’t happen while everything stayed inside me.
There are other people like me.
They deserve stories where someone like them isn’t just tolerated, judged, or turned into a category. They deserve characters who stand in their own truth even when the world tells them they’re wrong.
They deserve proof that someone else looked at the accepted answer and said, “That isn’t the whole story.”
I needed that proof too.
The books will remain after I’m gone. My thoughts, characters, and way of seeing the world may still reach someone I’ll never meet.
The books prove that these worlds existed.
The books prove that I existed.
And now they do.