The Road to the Storybook House
The journey to the Storybook House began when I was six years old.
At age six I had no idea of the Storybook House’s existence, but somewhat serendipitously, the house itself was built the year I turned six. Maybe the universe had a plan for me, or maybe it’s a happy coincidence. I know which explanation I prefer, in any case.
As the daughter of two librarians, I grew up surrounded by and luxuriating in books and stories. My parents read to me in my early years and then I took to reading like the proverbial duck to water. I had a wild and vivid imagination, both by my own recollection and that of my parents, who were often on the receiving end of my rather fanciful tales about afternoon adventures that only nominally bore a resemblance to reality.
In addition to my love of books—the more imaginative the better!—I also shared my father’s love of the original Star Trek series and Doctor Who (Fourth Doctor FTW!). Looking back, I think what those shows taught me was imagination didn’t have limits. Stories didn’t have to take place on this planet or in this time, and they could involve wondrous and strange beings and creatures whose forms were similar to ours or very, very much not. (The Horta, anyone?)
At age six, I wrote my first story on a page of Big Chief tablet paper, the paper du jour of kindergartners and first-graders in the mid-80s. In the story, a flower befriended a rainbow and they were happy until the rainbow had to go away (as rainbows do). Then the flower was sad. My mom hung onto that bit of childish flash fiction for a long time. Anyway, that was the day I set my feet on the road to the Storybook House.
I grew up watching Star Trek, ST: The Next Generation, ST: Deep Space Nine, ST: Voyager, and a host of other sci-fi and fantasy series and films, as well as the glorious X-Files. And I devoured every sci-fi, paranormal, supernatural, and mystery book I could get my hands on. (More about that in a previous blog post.)
And all through my tweens and teens, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.
I wrote stories. I wrote so many snippets of never-to-be-completed novels. I wrote fanfic (mostly Next Gen-based) long before I knew the name for what I was doing when I wrote stories involving Next Gen characters. I particularly liked writing adventures for Deanna Troi, who never seemed to get good scenes or stories in the series beyond telling Picard what others felt, or getting her brain fried by some mean alien. In my stories, she got to be badass and save the day.
I completed a couple of novels in my teens, all of which were some form of mysteries because I was super into police procedurals, P.I. books, and cozy mysteries. I even wrote a humorous whodunit set at a family reunion wherein the main character’s ex ended up dead in the pool with her grandma’s knitting needles sticking out of his chest.
I wrote some in college but very little in grad school since free time was rare. I read for fun whenever I could and discovered urban fantasy (through Kim Harrison’s the Hollows series) in my twenties. Still walking down the road, but my goal of becoming a writer seemed a far-off, if not impossible, dream.
Eight years ago or so, my sister moved into a cute house in Little Rock, Arkansas, which was where my mother’s family is from. Meanwhile, I had earned my PhD in English from Texas A&M in 2013 and taken a position as an English professor at a college in north-central Texas.
The first time I visited my sister, I saw the Storybook House.
The house is next door to my sister’s house: a two-story Victorian with green siding, with gables and a turret—a TURRET!—on the front. I fell instantly and irrevocably head-over-heels in love with it.
My sister and I dubbed it “the Storybook House” because it looked like something out of a fairy tale. It was the kind of house that needed an author to live in it, we decided. And for eight years, I gazed at it longingly every time I visited my sister’s house.
I never crossed paths with the woman who lived there. My sister met her a few times and said she was very nice but kept to herself. She loved to garden and took a lot of pride in her yard. People knocked on her door frequently to ask if she planned to sell the house, or so she told my sister once. She had no plans to sell it, however. The Storybook House remained a daydream for me--a tangible symbol of a life I could only dream of.
My dream of becoming an author, however, had miraculously become real. In 2017, I published my first novel, Heart of Malice, which introduced mage private investigator Alice Worth to the world. Between 2017 and 2022, I published eight more novels in the series, plus a few novellas and short stories.
Me, my sister, and my mom in 2018
In 2022, my world turned upside down. My sister and I lost our mother to cancer in January of that year. A good part of 2022 is hazy now, mostly a fog of grief and anger and all the other emotions you experience after that kind of loss.
But in October 2022, as the haze of grief began to lift, my sister tagged me in a Facebook post. The Storybook House was suddenly on the market! She tagged me as kind of a joke--as in, “That house you love so much is for sale! LOL!”
Come to find out, the house's owner had unfortunately passed away in 2020. It house sat empty for almost two years while her family disputed its ownership. Finally, a flipper bought it at an auction, renovated it, and put it on the market at the precise moment I had reached a point where I felt ready (more or less) to take a leap of faith and leave my professor career to become a—gulp!—full-time author.
Dear Reader, my hubby and I went and did something crazy. We bought the house.
I wish I could have seen the look on my sister’s face when I texted her that we’d made an offer on the Storybook House. As much as she and I loved the house, she didn’t think we’d actually BUY it, because whose dreams get to come true like that?
We’ll be moving in this summer. I have to finish the academic year and we’re still completing some renovations to the house prior to move-in. But come July, we’ll be living in my dream house, the Storybook House, and I’ll be its writer-in-residence.
I even commissioned a bit of artwork for the front of the house:
The road to the Storybook House was long and winding and mostly uphill. I wore out two laptop keyboards, drank oceans of coffee, cried a lot of tears (both happy and sad), and worked essentially three full-time jobs to get to its front door. I had the love and support of my hubby, my sister, my mom, and many friends and relatives. The journey was both a team effort and a long, solitary grind.
A few months ago I created an author LLC at the urging of my accountant. When it came to naming it, I kicked around some ideas, but quickly realized there was really only one logical choice: The Storybook House, LLC.
I don’t know if the house’s longtime owner could hear me, but I promised to love the house and cherish every day in its rooms and under its gables and turret. The room with the turret will be my home office, in fact. Every time I look up from my computer, I’ll remember the road to get here, and write my stories with gratitude and joy in my heart.
My future home office, complete with turret!