The Moment That Made It All Worth It

I have spent a great deal of my life building worlds. Not the kind you can see on a map, though those exist too — Dragon World has its deserts and its caverns and its snow-covered places where time does strange things. The Vegas Viking universe has its gods walking among us in modern cities, carrying centuries of secrets. I have spent years filling in the corners of these places, making them real enough that I believe in them myself.

But nothing I have written, nothing I have recorded, nothing I have published prepared me for this morning.

My granddaughter was here. She is ten years old and she knows more about my worlds than most adults who have read the books, simply by virtue of being nearby when I talk about them. She sat down with me and listened to the very first episode of the podcast.

It took her a few minutes to recognize my voice.

Then it took only a few seconds to recognize the dragons.

And then she was in it. Completely, wholly, unselfconsciously in it — the way only a child can be, without any of the adult armor we put on before we let a story touch us. I watched her face change. I watched her lean in.

By the end she already knew there was a second episode and she went to find it herself. She didn't ask permission. She didn't wait. She just went.

She wants her cousins to hear it.

I will be honest with you. I have had good days as an author. I have held a finished book in my hands for the first time and felt the weight of it. I have seen my covers come together and thought yes, that's exactly right. I have had readers tell me that a character stayed with them.

None of it felt quite like this.

Because this is what it was always for. Not the sales numbers or the metadata or the distribution pipelines — all of which matter and all of which I tend to obsessively — but this. A ten-year-old girl going to find the next episode on her own because she couldn't wait.

I built these worlds for a lot of reasons. But if I am being entirely honest, I built them for them. For the grandchildren who will still be able to walk around inside these stories long after I am gone. That is the legacy I am working toward, one book and one podcast episode at a time.

Today I got to see it take root.

It almost made me cry. Almost.

— D.L. Beechinor

Chronicles of Draignatur is available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Search Chronicles of Draignatur and start from the beginning — your dragons are waiting.