Someday Became Today

There is a version of me - not so long ago - who had “write a book” on a bucket list.

Not a series. Not a launch. Not a con table with two books, and a raven, and an owl, and swag bags filled with crystals and sage. Just a book. Someday. When the time was right. When life slowed down enough. When I felt ready.

I was never going to feel ready.

What I didn’t know then, what I couldn’t have known, is that the story wasn’t waiting for me to be ready. It was waiting for me to stop waiting. And when I finally did, when I sat down and started writing the thing I had been carrying for years, something shifted that has not shifted back.

The Triquetra Chronicles began as a bucket list item. It has become a world.

I don’t say that lightly. I mean it in the most literal sense. There is now a world that exists because I sat down and wrote it; characters who feel more real to me than some people I know, timelines that stretch across centuries, readers who have found something in these pages they tell me they’ve been looking for without knowing what to call it.

That last part still stops me.

What the con taught me

This past weekend I launched Book 2 at the Big OH Book Con in Medina. Half a table among a room full of authors, most of whom the world hasn’t fully discovered yet. Including me.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the conversations.

Not just with readers, but with everyone. Fellow authors, volunteers, browsers who stopped at the table. When I mentioned that I had launched Book 2 that very day, or the day before, something happened that I didn’t expect.

Strangers stopped. Looked at me directly. And said “Congratulations” like they meant it. “That’s amazing.” “Good for you.” Hearty, genuine, unrehearsed.

I have been so close to this for so long that I sometimes forget what it actually represents. Not just the writing, but the doing. The finishing. The showing up with two books and a table and saying here, I made this, it’s real.

Not the sales — though those happened and they mattered. The conversations. The woman who picked up The Harbinger and said she’d been looking for exactly this. The fellow authors who welcomed a first-timer into the fold without hesitation. The energy of a room full of people who believe in stories enough to spend their weekend surrounded by them.

I came home with more than I arrived. Not just in books sold but in something harder to quantify; a sense that this is real, that the world the series built has edges I haven’t found yet, that there are readers out there still waiting to find it.

That feeling is momentum. And momentum, I’ve learned, is its own kind of fuel.

The world keeps expanding

Since that first book launched a year ago, the world it made has kept growing in ways I didn’t plan and couldn’t have predicted.

A hometown tour is coming; three venues across three days/nights in Western New York in July…a library, a bookstore, a metaphysical shop. Each one a different expression of what this series is and who it’s for. Events at Gypsy Moon in the fall. A possible collaboration with a tea vendor whose name alone felt like a sign. A travel vendor at the con who carries Scottish brands. Conversations that became connections that are becoming something I don’t have a name for yet.

The bucket list item became a series. The series became a world. The world keeps making more of itself.

The part that matters most

My daughter was at the con this weekend.

She helped me build the table, apply the finalist stickers, fill the swag bags. She sat beside me and watched people pick up the books and read the back covers and ask questions. She is a writer and an artist herself, she had her own presence at the con in her own right, and watching her navigate that world with the confidence and curiosity she brings to everything she does was something I didn’t expect to feel as deeply as I did.

I wrote this series because the story insisted on being written. I kept going because something in me knew it mattered. But watching my daughter become part of the world it made, watching her see what it looks like when you stop waiting for someday and just begin, that is the part of this I will carry longest.

Someday became today.

The world it made is just getting started.