For about six years, if you’d asked me what I was working on, I would have said “nothing, really” and meant it as a lie so practiced it barely felt like one anymore. What I was actually doing, most nights, was hunched over a notebook — sometimes typed, mostly handwritten, in the specific illegible scrawl reserved for things you’re not ready for anyone else to read — building a world I wasn’t telling anyone about. That world has a name now: Lysoria. And as of a few weeks ago, it’s a real book called An Enchanted Heart, which you can buy, which strangers can read, which is a genuinely terrifying sentence to type.

The short version, if you want it: a girl named Aurelia Wynn is living with her aunt in a town called Lanton, ten years after her mother vanished without explanation. During a thunderstorm — because it’s always a thunderstorm — she wanders into the woods behind the house and finds a massive, split-open oak tree she used to call the Hearttree when she was six, glowing from the inside like something had cracked it open on purpose. She touches it. The world breaks open instead. She lands in Lysoria — silver sky, glowing trees, floating lights, the whole overwhelming production — and spends the rest of the book figuring out what her mother actually hid from her, and why, and what it cost.

That’s the plot. It is not, structurally, the hard part. The hard part was Calen.

Calen is the second character Aurelia meets in Lysoria — golden-eyed, dressed like he lost a fight with several different wardrobes at once, incapable of taking anything seriously for longer than a sentence. He exists almost entirely because I needed someone in the story who was allowed to make jokes, because the other lead, Thorne, is regal and silver-eyed and has said maybe four sentences with a smile in them across the entire manuscript. Calen got the line about getting trapped in Lysoria for six months because of “a very unfortunate run-in with a sentient nettle bush,” and I remember writing that line at close to midnight and laughing out loud, alone, in a way that probably would have concerned anyone who walked in.

There’s a woman named Eira who explains most of what Aurelia — and by extension, the reader — needs to understand about why any of this is happening. There’s a version of the story’s antagonist who goes by the Wraithmother, who does not get defeated so much as sealed, which felt more honest than a clean kill; some things you don’t get rid of, you just manage. And there’s an ending that involves Aurelia actually finding her mother, which I will not describe further, because apparently even I have limits on how much of my own book I’ll spoil in a blog post about my own book.

Here’s the part I’ll actually admit to: the book is dedicated to my two nieces, Sapphire and Emerald, and their names are the only two words in the entire manuscript I didn’t rewrite at least four times. Everything else got revised into the ground. Those stayed exactly as they were the first time I typed them.

Anyway. It’s out now. It exists outside my head, which took considerably longer than the thunderstorm in chapter one made it look.