"A doodle. I do doodle. You do doodle too."

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

I just finished my 4th? 5th? Read-through of Sorcery of Thorns and Mysteries of Thorn Manor. I have middling memory issues and with books I forget enough that I can reread them every once in a while and a lot of it is brand new to me. That being said, every single time I read these they just get better and better. Silas just permanently lives in the back of my brain, I think about him so often. To love something that cannot love you back, but does all the same in its own way... There is nothing more that I love about being a human than this, and I adore how much of it is contained in your writing.

Deepest respects

Hi anon,

Thank you so much for taking the time to send this. It's the kind of message that keeps me writing in my darkest hours. If you haven't seen already, there's a short story from Silas's POV available here, because he lives permanently in the back of my brain too. I doubt it's any secret at this point that his character is the reason why I wrote Sorcery, and for me, he's the book's soul. For some reason I never expected so many readers to agree, and it always means a lot to me to hear.

Stories are our bridges to each other and the moving waters below. Stories are connection. I wrote a book about the kind of thing I like to read, and in time a book came to me that was my kind of book. I did feel pressure to cop out, but I didn’t, and if I had I wouldn’t have received this sincere honour. We never know whether the ripples of change we make might become waves.

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If so please stop and go read your book or eat or something.

okay