When I try to find a beginning for my love of storytelling, I’m not sure where it is. Probably it’s in my childhood, somewhere between me listening to my father’s stories and my orchestrating of plays with stuffed toys. Or maybe it’s in the films I watched… I would experience them so vividly that their universes would overflow into other spheres of my life. I would include their characters and plots in my games and dreams. The line separating imaginary and real was, indeed, thin.

The year leading up to primary school was full of anticipation. I wanted to learn how to write so much that I even invented symbols in an attempt to do so. After learning the alphabet, I was so excited I was able to read that I read two books at the same time, “An adventure” and “Thirty devils”. Oh, I loved everything about reading! The suspense in the chain of events, the paper’s smell, being dragged into the story, the serenity of silence filled with the excitement of narrative… It was love at first book!

Stories are passports to adventures, connections, emotions, lessons. Paloma is a way for me to express the fusion between fiction and reality, in my life. My dream is to give Paloma’s readers at least a fraction of the joy I have creating it.

In february 2022, I travelled to Lapland. During that trip, so much inspired me. From the snow that was sometimes soft, sometimes crunchy, to crackling campfires under the stars to water streams silenced by ice. Characters were forming, day after day. The climate was cold but my heart was only getting warmer. Pieces of a story waiting to be told floated, as if a puzzle that could be put together. Then, and idea was brought to me, like a bird sitting on my shoulder. What if the characters wrote letters to each other?