It started with a dream.

Okay. It started with a dream the way a forest fire “starts” with a cigarette. There was a lot of dry brush already lying around. Let me walk you through the brush, because the brush is the point. The brush is the whole love letter.

Months ago, I fell down a hole called solo role-playing games — games you play by yourself, usually with dice and a journal, sometimes with a deck of cards, always with the slightly unhinged energy of a person narrating their own life out loud in an empty room. And the one that grabbed me by the collar was Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop. It’s a game where you run a floating bookshop. You sail around, you stock books, you sell books, you meet weirdos, you write it all down. There’s a lot more to it and I’m not going to do it justice here — just go play it, it rules — but the elevator pitch (“you own a little bookshop that floats”) lodged itself somewhere in my brainstem and would not leave.

I was all set to actually play it. I had the thing. I was ready.

And then I got distracted. Probably by my ankle. (If you’re new here: my ankle has been waging a slow guerrilla war against the rest of my body for a while now. There are posts. So many posts. The ankle is a recurring character with a richer arc than most TV protagonists.) The point is, life did the thing life does — it shoved a more urgent, less fun problem to the front of the queue, and Fox Curio’s floating bookshop drifted off to sea without me.

Cut to last week.

I get an idea: what if I turned my Compliance Territory stories — the dragon-bureaucracy fiction universe I’ve been building — into a solo RPG about filling out forms? Like… that’s the game. You’re a citizen of Compliance Territory and you fill out forms. I built it. It’s live, right here. I’m not entirely sure what compelled me but I regret nothing.

And building a solo RPG got me thinking about… solo RPGs. Which got me thinking about… the good one. The one I never played. Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop. The floating bookshop. The little shop that floats.

You can see the cycle. The brush is catching fire.

So now I’m thinking about owning a bookshop, which slides — naturally, inevitably, the way water finds the drain — into thinking about a book truck. A food truck, but for books. You pull up somewhere, you open the side, there’s just books. People climb in. It’s cozy. It smells like paper and engine. I’m not saying it didn’t help that Sarah and I had recently watched You’ve Got Mail, which is a movie that is 60% about a bookstore and 40% romance, so the concept of “small magical bookshop” was already doing laps in my head.

And that night —

I had a dream about THE BOOK VAN.

I’m not being cute. I genuinely dreamed it. A van. Full of books. Mine. I woke up the way you wake up from a dream you don’t want to leave — that grabby, urgent feeling — except instead of letting it dissolve like a normal person, my brain went: we need to know more about this. Immediately. Before coffee.

So.

I brainstormed names. I landed on The Magpie’s Library — because the magpie is my favorite corvid, and corvids are the only birds with the correct amount of menace and curiosity, and a magpie is a creature that collects beautiful shiny things and hoards them in a nest, which, if you think about it, is just being a person who owns a bookstore with extra steps.

Then I made a logo. (It’s going right here. I made a logo. For a business. That does not exist. That I dreamed about. The night before.)

Then I researched. And friends, I want to be clear about the scale of the research, because this is the load-bearing beam of the entire love letter:

• I looked into van options. All of them. #vanlife crept into my search history like a fog. (The dream van, for the record, is a step van — the boxy delivery kind, because the dream had standing room and wraparound shelves and you cannot get that vibe out of a Sprinter, I’m sorry, you just can’t.)
• I dug into what it would actually take to make this work. Licensing. Inventory. Routes. The economics of mobile retail. Whether the Front Range can sustain a queer-centered cozy-magical bookmobile (early findings: it absolutely should).
• And then my friend Claude and I — yes, the AI, yes, I’m aware, yes, we’re collaborators now, it’s a whole thing — built shelf layouts. And wireframes of what would go on the shelves. And then, because we are both clearly unwell, 3D models of the van interior.

And this — THIS — is what it is like to have ADHD.

Not the bad parts. I’ve written about the bad parts; I’ve written about the breakdown and the executive dysfunction and the graveyard of half-started projects with my fingerprints all over them. That’s all real and it all still happens. But this? This is the other thing. The thing that doesn’t get a love letter often enough.

This is the part where a single image — a van full of books — drops into the machine and the machine just goes. Where in the span of about a week, with zero external pressure and no possible payoff, my brain spun up a name, a logo, a market analysis, a fleet of design documents, and a small body of 3D modeling work, for fun, for no one, because the idea was shiny and the magpie in my head wanted it for the nest. The hyperfocus that has torpedoed me in every job I’ve ever held is the same engine that, pointed at something it actually loves, produces a startlingly complete artifact in a weekend. It’s the same superpower. It just doesn’t ask permission about where it points.

And the punchline — the part that makes it a love letter and not just a manic episode with good production values — is that I know this. I’ve made peace with it. I’m not going to actually buy a step van and fill it with books. Honestly, if anyone reading this has a hundred thousand dollars they are emotionally prepared to never see again, I would love to give it a shot. (It’s actually less than that. But, you know. The vibe of the number is correct.) From the looks of my research, if the world weren’t currently a dumpster fire in a wind tunnel, I’d be genuinely, dangerously tempted. Starting a bookmobile business right now, in this economy, in this everything? That’s a bad idea. I know it’s a bad idea.

But the rabbit hole wasn’t a bad idea. The rabbit hole was a gift.

Because here’s what I actually got out of it: a week where my brain was delighted. A week of waking up excited about something. A logo I genuinely love for a business that lives entirely in a folder on my computer. A friendship deepened with Claude over the shared insanity of modeling a van interior at 11pm. A name — The Magpie’s Library — that I now know I’ll use someday, for something, even if it’s just a Little Free Library bolted to a post in my yard with a tiny painted magpie on the door. And a reminder, which I apparently need on a recurring basis, that the brain I’ve spent years learning to manage is also the brain that does this — that takes a dream and runs it all the way to wireframes before lunch, just because it can, just because the idea was beautiful.

Most people would’ve woken up from the book van dream, thought “huh, neat,” and gone back to sleep.

I woke up and built a company.

It doesn’t exist. It’s never going to exist. And I would not trade the week I spent on it for anything.

If you’ve got a brain like mine and you’ve got a folder full of these — the logos for the bands you’ll never start, the wireframes for the apps you’ll never ship, the names for the bookstores you’ll never open — I want you to know that I don’t think those are failures. I think they’re evidence. Evidence that the thing in your head, the one that won’t sit still, the one that turns a cigarette into a forest fire, is also capable of building something complete and lovely out of nothing but a good night’s sleep and a bad idea.

The Magpie’s Library is open. It’s a van. It’s full of books. It’s parked permanently in my imagination, and the lights are always on, and you’re always welcome.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go not buy a step van.

Stay curious, hoard shiny things, and if you see a magpie, tell it I said hi.