Upon first meeting my friends from my semester in Wales, my husband remarked that we are a walking improv troupe–not because we are particularly funny, but because we live and die by the “yes, and” rule.

When I was three, my mother decided it was high time I learned how to read. She decided to begin homeschooling me, and thought I don’t really remember the particulars, I do remember the first book I ever read independently. The book was entitled Fat Pig, Thin Pig and was not in fact a real book, but rather a bunch of papers, torn out of one of my homeschooling books and folded to look like a tiny book made for a doll.

The idea for Nine Dragon Court was sparked when my husband noticed a street sign during one of our weekly Sunday morning drives to church. It grew from there, flames fanned by antiquing trips in middle-of-nowhere Illinois towns and shutdown-induced adventures to local state parks.

If you don’t know the name Hayao Miyazaki, your childhood was obviously inferior to mine. Miyazaki is basically like Walt Disney, only he’s better and also his head isn’t frozen somewhere in the depths of Disney World.

There’s a running joke that if someone studies abroad, they will then work it into every conversation they have from that moment on. I wanted the title of my first post on this site to make it clear that I studied abroad and am therefore incredibly cultured and mature, so I chose a fancy foreign word as the title.