.: Entry One :.

My name is Elliot Parker. I am not your average woman. I like to say I am a quarter of a century old, it feels more fun to me.

I spent my life reading stories, living in other worlds, I never not once thought I would be living a story myself. For me, other worlds, they were an escape. Now they are my living nightmare. I used to read as a child you know. For fun. No kids I knew loved it as much as I did. No kids I knew actually requested veggies to go with their dinners either. But here I am. I ate all those damn veg and I am still five foot two. Don’t believe the lies they tell you that it makes you grow up taller. Just eat the damn veg. Wait! I revise that, eat a balanced diet.

See, there is more to this story than what meets the eye. I have to be careful what I say, I acquired a… gift. And now? Well… now I am trying to learn how to use it.

Like I said before; I spent my life reading stories. Hiding. I spent my whole life in all these other worlds. Somehow I went from a reader to a writer. Now, I create worlds. I guess I always have. But now, I am learning to be careful with what I think, and say, and do.

My name is Elliot Parker. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I want to forget.

But sometimes, just sometimes. I am bloody brilliant.

I tried to lie to myself once. Ok more like a hundred thousand times. I tried to live in denial. But deep down… I always knew. I wasn’t right. I was different. It took a long time to accept that and an even longer time to embrace that.

So I bet you want to know about my gift?

I will get there. I promise.

When I started writing, I started to look at the world. I started to look at people. I noticed things, small things at first. The nuances of a facial expression. Soon I noticed more in a behaviour pattern. But it got worse. I stopped enjoying reading so much, when I noticed I was predicting plot twists and outcomes from the first few chapters. TV? Well, I could ruin a soap plot before it even began to develop. Slowly even that trickled into life. That’s when things got harder to gloss over.

I noticed patterns in those close to me, I predicted the future before it happened, then slowly I tried to experiment to change it. To change the outcome. And it worked. I had started to become a monster. That’s what I am. I know what people want to hear, I know what they want me to say, what they need me to say. “It’s ok”, but it’s not. Not anymore.

I started to change the lives of the people I cared about. Sure they had free will. If you can call it that. I didn’t always know what I was doing. What outcome I really wanted. I’m what you could call self-destructive. I’m not going to lie. Well. Actually, yes, I am. If I know what people want to hear, it means I know what they want. I know what they want from me. They always want too much. It means I know more than I should. It means I pick up on the unseen energy like an instinct and in a split second I can tell a lie, in the other half of that second I have to decide if I want to push for the truth or accept it for what it is. Now? I only let one of two people lie to me. One of them is myself. One of them, I love, unconditionally… That doesn’t mean I will always accept that lie and let it grow. All lies grow.

I keep telling myself I am a good person. When really, there is the greatest capacity with in me to be bad. And oh, how I want to be bad. I want to live without the consequence of guilt or regret. But that doesn’t happen for people like me. When I do bad, I feel it, it haunts me, in my sleep.

I have this dream. As a writer, I always say a character has a life of their own, they have free will, to a degree. The characters in stories, they are real, they have lives, and they write stories and they have dreams too. I couldn’t understand, in this dream I mean. I had been transported to this boarding school, as a teenager. I found myself in a magical world that transformed and inside it, thousands of books would appear crammed inside of bookshelves. That’s when I first realised the power in a character of a story, a world other than this. I saw the thimble from Peter Pan and the tiny clothes from Alice. That’s when I saw Robin’s book. The cover was green and the pages were old. I saw his dream. He wanted to run away with Marian and become a notoriously philanthropic pirate. Who’d have thought it? That room with the books. That’s where I met him. Another one like me. A creator of worlds. A story teller. A writer.

He said his gift was being an impossible thinker. He loved the impossible and finding a way to achieve it. Like me. This room with the books was a secret. Our secret. This place, was his, this was his spirit dream. His name, he said Adrian Kraig. I don’t know how he knew I was different. Just that I was. I still don’t want to believe what I know. I try to fight it every single day. Like I was never meant for this life. For this world sometimes. But what I do know, is I am what could be called a powerful creator.