This story didn’t begin with a sudden burst of inspiration. In many ways, it grew alongside me.
As a child, I loved making up stories. I would write little fairy tales and proudly read them to my parents. Later, during my teenage years, I became obsessed with fanfiction and spent countless hours writing stories inspired by the books I loved most.
Like many fantasy readers of my generation, I devoured Harry Potter. I also loved The Chronicles of Narnia. At the same time, I became fascinated by British history, especially the Regency era, and spent years reading Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. I even wrote fanfiction based on their works, with Sense and Sensibility becoming one of my favourite novels.
But long before I ever thought about writing a book, there was another idea quietly living in my imagination.
Keepers.
For some reason, I was fascinated by the idea that a single person could be responsible for protecting something much larger than themselves. Sometimes I imagined Keepers of cities. Sometimes Keepers of countries.
Eventually, those daydreams grew into Keepers of entire continents.
At that stage, I wasn’t building a fantasy world. I wasn’t planning a novel. I was simply imagining.
Whenever I was on a long car ride, sitting on a train, or lying awake before falling asleep, I would find myself inventing magical worlds and wondering what it would be like to step into one.
I genuinely believed there had to be a hidden way into another world.
Maybe you could jump over a fire? Or walk through an archway of trees in a forest and suddenly find yourself somewhere else entirely? I even filmed my own fantasy movie where the characters entered a magical world by jumping over a small fountain. Water became the gateway between realities.
As a child, I started calling this imaginary place “the Left Side.”
I knew exactly where the name came from.
When my best friend and I were around five years old, we discovered an old stone wall in the basement of her family’s old country house. In one corner, there was an arrow with the words “Left Side” written beside it.
Looking back as an adult, I realise it was certainly some practical construction marking left behind during the building process.
At the time, however, we had a far more interesting explanation. We were convinced it was a portal.
That corner of the basement became a gateway to another world in our imaginations. Somewhere along the way, the portal disappeared, but the name remained.
When I was twenty-four, I decided it was time to write my own story, carrying some of those childhood ideas into the novel as a way of paying tribute to the imagination that shaped it in the first place. That was the moment The Journey to the Left Side truly began.
I assigned a Keeper to each of the world’s continents. They received their own powers, responsibilities, and challenges.
The Left Side and the Right Side emerged, divided by a thin boundary between magical and non-magical realities.
The Tower appeared – an ancient organisation responsible for preserving the world’s geographical balance and protecting the fragile structure that keeps the continents separated.
Then came the Pangaeans, a group with their own vision of how the world should exist and their own reasons for wanting to reshape it.
The Keepers developed personalities, fears, ambitions, strengths, and flaws.
As the world expanded, so did its history.
Questions started appearing:
- Why do the Keepers exist?
- Who gave them their powers?
- What exactly are they protecting?
- What happens if they fail?
Little by little, mythology grew. Relationships formed. Conflicts deepened. And all of those questions, characters, and places became a story.
A story about continents and magic.
About balance and change.
About the truth we inherit and the truth we choose.
If you’d like to discover why the Pangaeans want to restore Pangaea, where the Keepers came from, what happened to the missing one, and what lies beyond the boundary between the Left Side and the Right Side, you’ll find the answers in The Journey to the Left Side.
