I wish...

There's a story that's been following me around since I was 11 years old.

I remember the first day it came to me. I wrote a brief half-page about a mischievous girl who gets caught after pulling a prank. I didn't know anything about the girl's life, or the other people in the scene, or the world outside that one little room. But I had enough sense when my Mom rang the bell for dinner to press "Save File." I called the file "anna.sam" (all the old Amipro files had .sam at the end), thus naming the heroine that would be running around my head for the next eleven years and counting.

Young Anna, short for Anastasia I discovered on subsequent visits to the computer over the next week, was a girl just like me: bored with where she's at and longing for adventures. Unlike me, though, she found just what she needed to propel her out of that boredom--but at a cost. By writing down a single wish, she ended up changing her whole life and the course of an entire nation. She finds fun, but also danger. She gains friends, but also enemies. And she loses in some ways too. She loses safety, loses any hope of a normal life. She loses some friends, and she loses some fights and she often loses perspective. At times, she even loses hope.

The story has been unfolding itself on different scales and in different manifestations, but come November, I'm finally going to unleash it. I'm tired of putting it off, of thinking I'm not ready to dive into this thing, that I'll do it wrong, mess it up, be nothing but a miserable failure.

Eleven years is long enough.

If I had to write down a single wish, it would be this: I wish I could tell this story the way it needs to be told.

Doing that, I think, will be a grand adventure.

12 Days to NaNoWriMo!