I’ve been gearing up for this for a while now. First the idea, then the acknowledgement that the idea is good, then the loose plans for implementation. Work, school, the drama of family and friends strives passionately to intercede, until months have gone by and still all I have is an idea. A good idea. In theory. In theory it is a good idea. But I’ll never know if it’s actually a good idea or not if I don’t do something about it.

So what I did, entirely through happenstance and without any pre-planning, is reread the worn, thin paperback that started everything. It wasn’t the same book, but the same edition, and it smelled exactly like 50 year-old pages and all the dreams that had shaped the days of my lonely, desperately imaginative childhood and, consequently, my entire character. I saw again in my mind’s eye the dragons, their brave and valiant dragonriders, the alien world with its Holds and Weyrs, and I understood a hundred new layers to words I had always held dear but hadn’t really known.

This is what movies should be. This is the movie I want to make.

This reaffirming experience happened at just the right moment; I’ve just moved to Germany from my hometown in New Mexico after completing my Bachelor’s in Digital Film Making, a path I undertook as a child madly determined to share the awe she felt when reading Dragonflight in a way the whole world could understand. Somewhere along the way, my childhood dream of dragons began to seem, well, childish. The world was a lot larger and scarier than I had ever anticipated, the goal I had chosen continually more distant and complex than I had realized. Maybe I could just be a director. Or a screenwriter. Or an writer of novels. I had a chance to inspire awe in those more attainable, but still challenging, ways. Those options were not unworthy of my ardor – they were just more practical.

Well, you know what? No.

I do want to be a director and a screenwriter and an author. I also want to be fluent in German and Russian and to be able to do yoga poses based on hand-stands. I want to win things, and go places, and be consistently inspired to create. I want to nurture this glorious love I have been given, be the best mother I can be someday, and wear pencil skirts and heels to buy groceries like a rockstar corporate queen. I want to reach some blinding plateau of being that melds self-awareness with self-expression. I want to become a Diamond level Zerg player of Starcraft II, and also a master chef. And learn to sew spandex. I hear that’s hard.

But these things are things that I want, and what I want isn’t good enough. What I want is not what I need, not what drives me and what has driven me for the past 12 years, through the fiery hells of puberty and high school, through college, and all the way across the ocean. What has driven me this far, and what I almost lost sight of, was the first time I really felt awe, deep in my bones. The desperate need to share that awe. And the only medium I have found to be worthy and capable of transporting that awe – dragons.

So I took this little Japanese man the Boyfriend gave me before we stared dating, and I colored in his right eye. Boyfriend tells me he was blessed in a temple, and he will stare at me every day missing his left eye until I succeed in my goal. Then I’ll draw in the other eye. I will sit down at the premiere of my long-awaited dragon movie, be it five or fifteen years from now, and after the credits have rolled I will pull this little Japanese man from my purse and color in his other eye. Boyfriend also tells me that the way I drew in his eye makes him look insane and a bit like an axe murderer. Good. It will take an axe murderer chasing me to keep me running up this mountain, every day, until the job is done.

And that is why I started this blog. It’s going to be a long, long journey. It already has been. But I have a Bachelor’s degree in film and Dragonflight has been stuck in development on IMDb for seven years, so things aren’t as bad as they could be. I’m 22 years old and I am rededicated and just as tenacious as I was as an 8 year-old.

The idea has been formed. The idea is good. Now: DO.

See? Intimidating.