Preface
Where does inspiration come from and why does it stick with you until the itch is too much to bear? How come it changes, transforms, fills your every thought until it is in everything you do? Avaleen has been with me for many, many years but not in this form. It was a poem once upon my early childhood when I was typing away on my grandmother's typewriter on her kitchen isle. I was like five years old and it was slow going, mostly because I was five but also because my fingers kept slipping between the keys.
Then it was a book about this wandering goddess that I never published cause I was about 12 years old, and it felt like I had no one around me but these characters. And my pen. It is how I have dealt with the world, with my imagination, with learning languages, with life as it happens around me and my thoughts about it. With understanding different truths, different views on the same matters, with the human condition. I have tried my hand at anything and everything. Scripts. Plays. Poems. Short stories. Novels. Fantasy epics. Musicals. Songs. Crime. Drama. Romance. Sci-fi. But this? This was never on the map.
Fantasy hooked me from the moment I read Eddings, and I do consider myself a nerd. Cause I love it. I have created numerous plays and films, brought to life countless more as an actress, I have found so many ways and so many people to tell my stories with and share them with the world. Since my little brother discovered Warhammer and computer games I have been a little jealous, but always kept myself away because it was his thing. In hindsight, such a big-sister-move.
But I was content with the forms of storytelling and narrative design that I used. That is, until I fell in love with a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons. And suddenly everything clicked into place. And I came to realize that the limits I had imposed on myself became this stifling, suffocating, monochromatic fog enveloping my very essence and my inner child. No more.
All my love, Maria MJ Jones
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