Miranda Pierson

I believe each person holds more lives than the one everyone sees from the outside.

I'm Appalachian to the bone, invested in the folklore, the churches, the graveyards, the things half-buried in these mountains. I've also spent whole years inside a digital world, building things no one could touch.

For years I led a guild through several MMOs, the Dread Lady Anguissette, if you were there. It was never just about a game. It was about giving people a story bigger than themselves. They always had a choice, and they kept choosing the stories we built together.

Same drive with the horses. As a little girl, I'd sit alone in my room telling myself stories about all the ways grown-up me would be happier than this. She made promises inside those imagined worlds, and when I grew up, I tried to keep them. Breeding colored warmbloods she would have been proud of.

The boat is the one that isn't really about me. My husband is a quiet man, content in a way most people aren't. Years ago, on someone else's sailboat, I watched him smile ear to ear. That is the whole reason we own a boat now. I wanted to see him smiling like that in our story.

Travel is the same urge pointed outward. I've stood on the black beaches of Iceland and been caught in a whiteout on a glacier on another continent. I've watched baby humpback whales breaching on the far side of the world. But mostly, I watch people. How they move, how they talk, how they touch each other, what their worldview looks like when it's been shaped by a piece of ground I've never stood on before. I'm endlessly curious about other people's stories.

Different rooms, same person, same instinct: you don't get good stories if you don't go all in. Stories are a gift we give one another. They are precious. That is what the guild was. That is what the horses were. That is what the boat is. That is what travel is. And in the end, it's what every novel is trying to become.