Ten years ago, almost to the day, I fell so much in love with the television show Eureka that I searched online for news about the next season, and discovered fanfiction. I’d never even heard of fanfiction before, much less read it, but I promptly read all the Eureka stories that were available.

None of them were quite right. None of them were what I wanted the story to be. So I wrote my own. I published it on 11/9/2010. And then I added a chapter, because people said nice things about it. Then I wrote a whole story, with a plot as much like a Eureka episode as I could manage — crazy science, familiar characters, the diner, and the smart house named SARAH. It was called An Australian Werewolf in Eureka, and literally, ten years ago today, I would have been three days into writing it. It took me a week — the first chapter was posted on 11/14 and the last on 11/21 — and was 20,894 words long. Almost 3000 words a day — a number I would declare impossible for me except for this clear evidence that I did it once. While also working full-time and going to grad school part-time.

Then I wrote another story and another and another, and eventually I stopped writing fanfiction and started writing fiction, ie stories set in my own worlds with characters from my own imagination.

Then I quit my job, published a book, dropped out of grad school, published another couple of books, sold my house and moved into a van, published a few more books, and spent four years wandering around the country.

Today I stood in the Eureka, California DMV, and made it official: I live in California now. Not quite in Eureka, but just a few miles away. And it is so amazing and weird and amusing to me that there is such a direct causal link between falling in love with a television show named Eureka and winding up living here, in this delightful quirky small town.

This isn’t what I expected for my life. This isn’t even what I expected at the beginning of the year. But I really am grateful every single day that I wound up here, and for what came into my life from that incredibly random moment of sitting down next to my son and saying, “What’s this show about?”