I’d planned to blog today, and that blog was meant to be about my first writing love—literary fiction for adults, which I aspired to write since college—and how dreams shift and balloon and curl back in on themselves, and how dreams expand and take on new faces, and how your dreams change as you grow and change.

But then I began thinking about the book I did write, the book that led me away from my original dream into a new dream. This was Imaginary Girls. Last night, in the aftermath of a mini identity crisis, E and I were talking, in the way we do, about my future as an author. He’s just as invested as I am in this, and he knows all of what I want to do, can do, could do, might do, and wish to do. We talked about how Imaginary Girls turned out—the book I wrote. It doesn’t matter who the audience was meant to be, before or after or during. Would I have written a single word differently? And the answer is no: That book is exactly how I want it to be, how I meant it to be. I was true to my characters. I was true to my intention. True to my love for my sister. True to myself.

Truth.

Imaginary Girls is the book of my heart.

Which brings me to today, in which I came upon Beth Revis’s beautiful post: “The Book of My Heart.” She says so much and more:

If you’re a writer who is unpublished, then I hope and pray you will eventually write the book of your heart. It’s a wonderful thing, and the closest I’ve come to touching magic. But I also want you to know something very, very important: the book of your heart is not the apex of your writing. It is not necessarily the best thing you’ve written, and it’s not necessarily your only shot at getting published.

I encourage you to read her post, if you’ve written the book of your heart years ago, or if you’re writing the book of your heart today. Even if you haven’t found the book of your heart yet and you wonder where it might be.

And if you’ve written the book of your heart already and have seen in published, I encourage you to read the comment on that post from Jo Knowles.

I have no more words today.