I thought losing 45 pounds would feel like a victory parade. Cue the glitter, the applause, the breezy montage of me tossing old clothes over my shoulder and strutting into a dressing room like a woman reborn.
Instead, I found myself in a department store
three-way mirror, wondering if I’d wandered into a circus funhouse.
Here’s the thing no one tells you: when your
body changes, your style doesn’t automatically download a new user manual. I’m
not a fashionista. I like to write about strong women and overcoming obstacles,
not crop pants and rise lengths. And when it comes to jeans? I’d rather wrestle
a love triangle than figure out if I’m “curvy high-rise” or “straight
ankle-cut.”
I stood there in the dressing room—half
undressed, fully confused—staring at a label that read “slimming stretch.”
Lies. The only thing it slimmed was my patience.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of the work it
took to lose the weight. But in that moment, all I wanted was a pair of jeans
that fit and didn’t try to gaslight me with a size number that made no sense. I
miss the elastic waistbands. I miss the yoga pants. I miss not caring!
But maybe that’s the lesson. We’re all in
transition—whether it’s our bodies, our stories, or our characters. And just
like romance, sometimes you have to try on a dozen awkward fits before you find
the perfect one.
For now? I’m celebrating my size-uncertain
hips and my unapologetically soft style. If my heroine can slay demons dressed in
leathers and face paint, I can survive shopping for new clothes.
Maybe…
Meanwhile, my writing is as unpredictable as my shopping- Here is the next part of chapter one:
I remember nothing of life before Master Faren. It was
as though I’d sprung to life at five winters old—filthy, barefoot, and
half-starved—appearing on his doorstep with nothing but a soot-streaked face, a
bag of rune stones and a strange black quill clutched in my hand.
I
was just a little mortal girl with a strange mark on her left shoulder, raised and pale like molten wax hardened in the shape of a
flame and a quill. A mark that prickled during storms and that sometimes, in
the stillness between heartbeats, hummed.
No name. No
origin. No recollection of my past.
With hair black as a raven’s wing and eyes the color
of storm-soaked earth, I stood out among the flaxen-haired, fair-skinned
villagers who prized sameness like a virtue. And in a place where uniformity
was sacred, I was an unforgivable deviation.
Whispers followed me through the narrow lanes of
Dalswyth. Some claimed I was a changeling. Others swore I’d crawled from the
underworld. Children ran from me. Old women crossed themselves.
I wasn’t a monster, though;
I was just different.
At first, the rejection stung—sharp
as frostbite, and just as numbing.
Master Faren always found me. He’d
wrap me in his arms until the tears dried, then sit me in the crook of his
armchair and read to me about ancient legends until the ache in my chest dulled
into something quieter. Something bearable.
But pain taught me something else:
how to disappear.
By the time I was older, I’d stopped
trying to belong. I’d started to climb.
When the village boys chased me with
sticks, yelling names I didn’t understand—old slurs for changelings and
witch-born things—I didn’t fight back. I didn’t have to. I could vanish when it
suited me, slipping through broken fences, up drainpipes, into attic beams or
beneath crumbling stone.
It became a kind of game… one I
always won.
I could scale rooftops before I knew
how to braid my hair. I moved through spaces most people never noticed—low
windows, high ledges, the hollow between walls. I could land without a sound.
Breathe like I didn’t need air.
The townspeople whispered that I had
no bones. That I was half-spirit. That I climbed like a cat and fell like a
leaf.
And maybe… they weren’t wrong.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
How is your Summer writing coming along?
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