After nine years of telling the stories of other characters, I figured it was time to tell you a little bit about my own.

I grew up in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. In retrospect, it was a great place to grow up. At the time? BORING. Like, spectacularly, achingly boring. Which turned out to be the best thing that could've happened to me, because my imagination had nowhere to go but everywhere. Star Trek, Star Wars, Battletech, Lord of the Rings… and D&D since I was 13 - always as the DM, always building worlds. I'm currently running a campaign that started eleven years ago with four girls and two guys at the table. It's now six girls - but all the same players. Make of that what you will. 😊

I went to college in Boston. Specifically, Emerson College for a B.A. in Film Production - yes, just like Maya in Taylor Made. After graduating, I moved to Los Angeles and lived there for about fifteen years. I loved the sun, the food, the color of the sky at 7:30 p.m. in September. Every day was 72 and sunny, and I loved the feeling that every story in the world was happening somewhere in the city, maybe right under your nose, or behind the bathroom door of a coffee shop on La Brea, or in the silence between two cars at a red light on the 405. I loved the way time slowed down. Nobody warned me about that, really. They talk about traffic and earthquakes and rent, but not about the time. Honestly, my fifteen years in Los Angeles felt like sixty everywhere else.

Currently, I’m in Vermont. It’s a nice little state, although, sometimes, it gets lonely. It’s an old place. The houses lean in the wind. The floors creak under your feet. There are days when the air feels thick with memory, not all of it yours, and you start to wonder if you’ve lived here before in some other life. It’s strange - and I’m thinking about moving back to Los Angeles.

I've been writing since I was about 12 years old. Filling notebooks (my first was a Jurassic Park fanfic) and writing novels that nobody ever saw because I was too afraid to show them to anyone. Later on, I worked an office job during the day that didn’t matter to anyone, myself included. At night, I came home and wrote. Eventually, I started creating "TG" caption stories and people actually seemed to enjoy them. That gave me the courage to try something bigger and so I taught myself Daz Studio. I wanted to bring my stories to visual life and I couldn't draw very well. (I've gotten better since then.) That's how Jack & Jill was born - I wanted to tell a feminization story that dealt more realistically with the psychology of what that experience would actually do to a person.

Of course, I’d tricked myself into believing that this interest in “gender-bending fiction” was just that - an interest, a curiosity, something separate from who I "really was." And then Holly showed up.

I think that's why she means so much to me. I love all of my characters, but Holly is the one who changed me. She's not as strong as Jill - that's kind of the point. But she's strong in her own way. Holly was actually more responsible for me rediscovering that I'm trans than Jill is, because Jill is the ideal. Jill is aspirational, a best-case scenario. Holly makes mistakes. She’s messy. She doubts herself constantly - and not in a cutesy, sitcom-protagonist way, but in the “maybe no one will ever really love me” way. She wants so badly to be good, and she’s terrified she’s not. She feels pain deeply, and she doesn’t always know what to do with it, so she makes jokes and tries to be cool, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Also, like her, I was terrified of what it would mean to be a trans woman in the real world. I know that's trans 101. But Holly voiced and embodied all of those fears for me on the page, and writing her helped me face them in my own life. The difference is that I got out. I started transitioning around Phase 2 of J&J. Holly is - at the moment - still trapped, still terrified of who she'll be off the island. Maybe that will change with Phase 10.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I wanted to write all this - to sort of re-introduce myself - because being trans in the world right now is a kind of war. Our existence is political. Just living as we want / need to live is somehow a statement. Some days, I miss when fewer people knew about us. When we could just be. When nobody cared one way or another what you were. Or, if they did care, at least they kept it to themselves. Quiet disgust. The kind you could almost respect. Nobody yelling in your face at the grocery store. Nobody trying to outlaw your existence on a random Monday morning. You just lived. People got on with it.

That’s not the world anymore. Something went wrong.

But, I think, the best antidote to that is not hiding or shrinking or apologizing. It’s showing up. It’s putting yourself, your face, your story, out there. Which is why I keep writing these ridiculous, heartfelt, sometimes erotic, sometimes awkward stories about people like me, or like you, or like the person you secretly wish you were when nobody’s looking. If anybody can read them and feel a little less alone - if even one person does - that’s worth more than any paycheck I could ever earn from my day job. For a few hours, a few thousand words at a time, we get to not be the only one of us in the universe. We get to be real.

I guess what I’m really saying is thank you.

I know, it’s corny. Whatever. I don’t care. That’s another thing about being trans - you get used to not caring what people think, or you learn to fake it. I’m not sure which I’m doing these days. Maybe both.

But on the dark days, your comments pull me out of it. The hearts and comments on posts give me a stupid big smile. You make me want to wake up and keep going, keep creating for you, for these characters we love together.

So, yeah, this is me. This is who I am: A trans woman who writes stories about transition and transformation and love and hate and redemption and loss and all the messy stuff in between that makes us human. Because that’s what I know, that’s what I’ve lived. And maybe, in some small way, telling these stories helps someone else out there who’s going through the same thing. Or maybe it just entertains you for a little while. And you know what? That’s okay too.

Thank you for reading and letting me know you’re out there. For sharing this weird digital life together, even if you’re just here to see the pretty girls.

If you ever want to chat, my DMs are open. 💕

P.S. The photo is my reaction to my friend Jade sending me Beaver Nuggets from Buc-ee's, which I'd never had before. Delicious! Nikki is a lucky girl. 😋

Jehaknaboom, are you claiming to be Emory Ahlberg, or is this a post they made that you've copy/pasted?

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it's a copy from emory's patreon posts

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Why the AI tag? Emory always rendered things herself waaay before AI.

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