[ WATTY AWARD WINNER - INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING ] Lily has been on her own since she left high school, and she ventured towards the vast wilderness of the Grand Tetons where she became a waitress at a diner, met her two best friends Amaya and Bennet, and planned to start over in a more-than-hipster cabin in the foothills. The tranquility she has felt is bound to vanish eventually, and the disappearance of fellow neighbors and the arrival of strangers is what brings her peace to an end. [BOOK ONE. BOOK TWO IS "The Anomaly of Gavin Wilde".]

Sometimes all you really need is a place to call home. * * * Being re-written completely as of May 14, 2021

They weren't supposed to meet. But life does that sometimes; it throws in a couple of new faces that bring you the utmost of joys in the most unlikeliest of places, and every now and then, you'll come across someone who changes you - someone who's genuine and wonderful and full of hope; someone who changes your perspective on the things that you had stored away in the cardboard box sitting in the dark corner of your closet, someone who opens up your eyes to new things; bright and beautiful things that you can't believe you hadn't seen before, someone who's iridescent. And once you meet them, nothing will ever compare.

Sometimes it snows, and sometimes you meet beautiful boys with cameras, and sometimes it snows and you meet beautiful boys with cameras. // #20 in short story //

"Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell." -Kim Edwards Eleanor Morisette doesn't speak. She doesn't have an illness that causes it, and wasn't born mute; she just chooses not to talk. What reason is there to say words when no one's there to hear them? Instead, she expresses herself through the art of photography. Obsessed with the beauty in the world that overshadows her own problems, all she wants is to someday capture life to its fullest; without having to worry about her parents' declining love and the loneliness of being an outcast at school. But what happens when she accidentally takes a photo of a boy who she can't take her mind off? Will he be the one to open up her shell? Or will she continue wandering lost in her world of lonely magic?