If you’re an observant sort of person, you may have noticed that I have a new button on this website. It’s labeled “Serial,” and if you click on it, you will see the first thirteen of my posts about the Shadowlands and the Other Country. Enough of you said you were interested in those posts and wanted to hear more of the story that I thought I would put it all together for you. That way, if you just came in, you can go all the way back to the beginning. And you won’t miss anything, because after posting on my blog, I’ll repost under the Serial button. (It may take a while, but it will eventually appear under Serial.)

Original posts will still appear on my blog, because this is a story I’m telling in real time, as I think and feel it. Or it’s a story that Thea is telling, and perhaps all of my posts are really her posts, and Dora is just a character she’s creating. I’m not sure which would be the best option, really.

The first part of the serial, made up of those thirteen posts, is called “Into the Other Country,” and it’s about how Thea traveled to Mrs. Moth’s house, and then told the story of the last time she had been there, when she accidentally found herself in the Other Country. She visited Mother Night’s house, had several conversations, including with Cordelia the cat (who is as obnoxious in real life as she is in the story), danced with Merlin for the first time, and then returned to the Shadowlands having learned something about herself and her purpose in life. I wasn’t thinking about these posts as part of a story when I wrote them. I just wrote them when I was in a particularly dark place and needed somewhere else to go, and the Other Country looked so enticing, with its house of stones and dragon bones, and its trees with leaves and flowers that never fall, and Mother Night herself, who knows the pattern we are all part of, even if we don’t know it ourselves.

But I think the next part of the story will have to do with Thea’s adventures in the Shadowlands, because as I think I’ve mentioned, she and her friends, Matilda, Emma, and Mouse, have saved the world several times. And I still need to figure out how.

It’s been a new and interesting experience for me, committing to writing on this blog every day. It means that I have to write, no matter how I feel that day. And how I feel seems to find its way into these posts, whether through a story or simply an account of me looking at myself in the mirror and thinking about the future I want to create. Being a writer, or at least the kind of writer I am, anyway means living with one fewer layer of skin than other people seem to have, experiencing the world more directly – sometimes more joyfully, sometimes more painfully. And it means writing out of that, transforming personal experience into stories. So I don’t know where these posts about the Shadowlands and the Other Country will go. There is no larger plan, just what I think about on any particular day. I hope you enjoy the journey.