As a writer, the passion of love fascinates me, consumes me, and drives me to craft ever more complex stories of the breathtaking places our hearts can take us. Stories of war, of enemies, of boundaries, of journeys into the unknown which transcend the barriers of space and time.

While speaking about Earth as the Pale Blue Dot, humanity's only home against the incomprehensible immensity of the universe, Carl Sagan once said: “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”

He's not wrong. It is unbearable. We collapse ourselves into our lives, our thoughts, our hopes, fears, and dreams. And love. We fill ourselves with it. Wait for it, crave it, seek it, chase it, talk about it, dream of it, analyze it. And read it. Love. Its existence possesses me like an anguished thing desperate for its release—to liberate itself through my words in all its dark and beautiful glory.

In ages past, men and women have gone to war over love, have died for love, have sacrificed everything for love. We may live in quieter times, yet our souls still crave the magnitude of such epic, all-engulfing passion—of heroes and near-unconquerable cities such as Troy under siege for the sake of love. Within the innermost rooms of our hearts, each of us longs for the scope of an all-encompassing affair which smashes every barrier. It is the pulse of the star stuff within our souls, the seeking of an eternal connection that defies the unbearableness of our solitariness in a digital world which strives to separate us with every breath we take.

We know the pain love can bring, and yet we pursue it because the unbearableness of being alone is unnatural, unsustainable. If we must be alone, then we imagine being with the one our heart desires. At times it is all we can have, but it can be enough. For a time.

It is a quiet irony the man I loved with all my heart left me last summer for another younger, healthier woman. And yet, in the sudden days of my solitary existence I continued to write of love. I completed The Rise of the Goddess with a broken heart, channeling pain and sorrow into the final book of the Transcendence series. It turned out to be the most beautiful book of them all. Perhaps it was meant to be, that I should lose my love to write the book as it was meant to be written. Perhaps.

And now, as I rise broken and battered in the fallow fields of my loss, love has become an ugly, distorted thing. And yet, I still dream of love, still imagine heroic feats of sacrifice, of determination, of facing insurmountable odds and overcoming them. So my fingers fleet over the keyboard and I escape into dark worlds, beautiful worlds, where love is transcendent. I want to take you there. Because where there is love there is hope, truth, salvation, bliss. And stories take us there, away from our solitariness and into the hidden corridors of our hearts, where we find shelter from the storm of our existence.

And so, the stories will go on. So long as there is love, there will be stories to tell. Epic, glorious, breathtaking stories of undying love until our souls return to the stars. And it will be there, scattered across the heavens, as we wait for chance to tumble to the Earth once more, we will understand the truth. We are love.

The stories have been about us all along.