~~Intro to The Storyteller's Citadel~~

      Hello, world! My name is The Hopeful Maiden and this is my blog, The Storyteller's Citadel. I'm so glad you're here! 

  

    And now that you are, allow me tell you a few things about myself. 

    

    Number one: I love books, and I have since I was very young. One of my very favorite things to do as a child when I was quite bored was to take every single picture book off of our bookshelf, (and we had quite a few!) arrange them in a pile only slightly smaller than myself, and read the whole lot before dinner! It didn't matter if I had had that book read to me a million times, it was in the pile. That is one of my favorite childhood memories.   

      Another example of just how much I love stories comes about when I was entering my early teens. Every week my family would make a highly anticipated trip to our local library. I loved books so much that I, with my own money, had bought a backpack for the sole purpose of carrying my lofty tower of thick middle and high school grade stories home. (Think Harry Potter and The Missing Series By Margaret Haddix, thick!) The backpack served me well for many years despite being stuffed so much to the point where it was much frayed and disfigured. 

    One fateful day, the inevitable happened: a strap broke. Did I learn my lesson and stop stuffing that poor bag with thirty books at once? Nope! I simply transitioned to the much cooler way of wearing your backpack which is, of course, the "Off one Shoulder" look. 

    Then the other strap broke. Did that stop me?! No. No, by golly, it didn't! After that, I simply carried my backpack by the strap at the very top or in my arms tucked under my chin. 

    By some miracle, that bag is still around today. It sits, right at this very moment, in a cupboard under my desk, the dear old thing. 

   

     Number two: That love of journeying to other worlds by paper and ink transformed itself into a love for being the one who wrote on the paper, with the ink. I mean, now I'm a writer. (What are words!) And, I'm proud to say I have been writing my own stories for about six or seven years now. It's much longer than that if you count the short stories I wrote in my diary as a small child. 

    I suppose I gravitated to writing stories because they're just so powerful. The stories of redemption, the stories of faithfulness, of friendship and of grace, they stick with you long, long after you've finished the last page and closed the book. They encourage, and strengthen, and they inspire. Those are the kind of stories I can't help but fall in love with, and those are the stories I aspire to write.

           

    Number three: I love music! But there's a catch... Most of the music I listen to is by epic or classical music composers or it's a soundtrack from a film or TV show. That means that most of it doesn't have words. The few songs with lyrics that I'll listen to are songs that tell a story with their words that either happen to correspond with a feeling I'm having, or a character or scene I'm creating. The one other exception is worship music. 

    Number four: I love taking pictures! Capturing the tiniest detail of God's creation or mundane things inside my home- is just so much fun!  

    Number five: Lastly, above all else I am a Christian. And my faith impacts my art in all the best ways! I view God as the Ultimate Storyteller, crafting the Greatest Story of all time. He is the author of my story and yours and everyone's. And I love Him very much.

   

    So that concludes my first ever blog post! (Bonus fun fact: I've wanted a blog since I was around seven!) 

    Thank you so much for reading!! 

    I hope you enjoyed it and that you have a wonderful week! 

    With love, 

            The Hopeful Maiden.

            Remember, Dear Heart, we are all between the paws of the one true Aslan.