Hello, Dear Old World

_{“The Hill Top” by Charles Courtney Curran, 1915, with colors altered by me.}

If you ever start a WordPress blog, you’ll find that there’s already a sample post published, and the title of it is “Hello world!”

In the world of coding, this is a reference to a simple test program that beginners will often use as a test to see if a program is functioning properly, and it dates back to the 1970s.

This personal blog project, on the other hand, dates back to early 2025, which was when I began wending my way through learning how to build my own independent websites.

I’d become tired of ever-changing algorithms on big platforms, and I wanted to have a place to call my own: something predictable, cozy, and familiar. A homely house tucked away from the shadow of the skyscrapers, a sanctuary for the refreshment of my soul.

This will be a space for me to share my original fairy tales and other stories, my thoughts on books and art and music and film, and where I may generally ramble to my heart’s content about anything that inspires, fascinates, or moves me.

I also have a project called The Castle Library, which is devoted to fairy tales, myths, fables, legends, and folklore. I was inspired by all of the collections of such stories published in the 19th century, and I decided to try my hand at publishing my own retellings.

So hello, dear old world, to quote a kindred spirit!

I’m still working on getting everything set up and ironing out wrinkles as I find them, and I’ll be republishing a few old blog posts from other platforms in the meantime to test formatting, so if you remember me from elsewhere and you experience déjà vu — that would be why!

And finally, I know em dashes have a tendency to raise an eyebrow in today’s increasingly inhuman internet, but I will not be parted with them — it was in fact L.M. Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, that first got me hooked many years ago!