In 1802 Albert Mathieu-Favier began telling people a story.

Imagine, he said, a tunnel that dives under the sea that separates France from England. It will be lit by oil lamps, and big enough for a horse-drawn carriage to pass through. Here, he said, is an island where the drivers will change horses. Here, he added, is the second tunnel that will carry away groundwater.

It was a crazy story.

And so everyone continued to make the trip by boat.

Later, people started to travel between the countries in a conveyance that had also started as an outlandish story: flying machines!

But Mathieu-Favier’s story never entirely faded away.

When I was three years old, people started talking seriously about the Channel Tunnel, this time for a train.

In 1990, when I was 18, the story first told by a Napoleonic-era French mining engineer had become a reality, as an English engineer reached through a gap in the rubble, under the sea, half way between France and England, and handed his French counterpart a cuddly toy version of Britain’s most famous fictional immigrant: Paddington Bear.

Stories FTW

Everything our civilization has ever produced,

• started as an idea,
• took root as a story, and
• became reality when someone told the story well enough to convince a lot of people to make it real.

The world needs people who are curious.

The world needs people who can create characters, and situations, and worlds that we want to make real.

What you do is not frivolous.

And it’s not easy.

It’s hard to do alone.​

If November looks like it might be a hard month for you (and December, and January), it’s worth finding a place that is a refuge.​

Next week I’m opening up membership in the StoryADay Superstars for the next six months, because we need to be together.

I’ll have some more information (and some really nice bonuses) for you over the next few days.

If you want to know more, sign up here

You’ll get a free “Creative Commute” lesson and worksheet, and I’ll know I should send you more information about the program.

Let’s keep writing through whatever life throws at us!

Keep writing,

Julie