Welcome, friends.

Allow me to introduce myself; Jennifer, the writer, and the narrator who will be your guide to this story for the next few years. I am a storyteller, not by trade, mind you, but by nature. Since I was a child I have been telling stories, things of great wonder and enchantment, but progressive in nature - princesses were hardly ever helpless and witches were not always wrong. They were all of them challenging, fraught with dangers, but wonderful voyages in fantasy, something I was given to since I could speak, and they remain that way now.

Though my writings are numerous, and also the all consuming interest of my life, I have never really given strong thought to publishing. Publishing should not be the end goal of writing. Stories are for the sake of themselves- they are for telling, for teaching, for learning from and for entertaining. And all sensible people know there’s no money to be made in telling stories anyhow.

But I tell them anyway. Sometimes we simply cannot help ourselves.

As I wrote more and more I realized that publication was going to be a necessity- these stories did not only need to be told, they needed to be heard. There are many stories I have read over the course of my life that have stayed with me, changed me, or challenged me. These stories deserve to chance to be that for someone else. So I resolved to create a publication.

This was the last story I ever thought would be my first public work, but things in life very seldom turn out the way we think they will. I had a great many novels full of excitement, dragons, volcanoes, and much more epic things than The Tempest has to offer, but they went on hold for various reasons; school overshadowed them, I found out the premise was unworkable, or one day I wandered aimlessly away from them and left them to gather mental dust on my mind’s bookshelf. I despaired slightly, stuck in the way that writers get, fretting that I would never ever complete anything noteworthy. But then one fine day a little Cuban waitress named Anita cleared her throat and very quietly said, “Excuse me, but I have something to say.”

This is the story she told me.

My roommate and the artist is Anne, and all the beautiful images here are hers. She has been with me since the story’s conception, and I would never dream of anyone but her doing the illustration for it.

It has been a long hard toil for the past 9 months to get this off the ground, and I would like to think the people that helped us along, especially Brian, Mike and Casse for the hours they gave and the brilliant work they did with the site. And to my father for listening to me cry over the phone for hours about how the plot was bad, my teeth are bad, I might have a brain disease, and my life is meaningless (somehow by the end of those hours he always managed to point out to me that my stories are very good, and no, I do not have meningitis).

So I hope you enjoy it, and even if only one person takes away some meaning from this work, well, then we’ve done our job.

Best,

jh

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.