Lost to Fantasy. Or Found.

I owe you an April.

Life intervened — as it tends to do — and the Lift went quiet. But here's the thing about going quiet: sometimes it's avoidance, and sometimes it's incubation. This was the latter. Mostly.

Because while I wasn't writing here, I was disappearing. Deliberately, gleefully, and without a single regret. Into fantasy.

Specifically, the particular brand of dark, addictive, morally complicated “Romantasy” that has been quietly colonizing the reading lives of women who probably should be doing other things. Thousands of pages. Multiple series. Late nights that had no business being that late. The kind of reading that stops feeling like leisure and starts feeling like necessity - as critical and life-sustaining as breathing. The kind you can't explain and don't try to.

But before I explain what the humming eventually produced, I need to be honest about what drew me in so completely in the first place.

It wasn't the world-building, as extraordinary as it is. It wasn't the romance, though I have no complaints. It was her. The Female Main Character. Almost universally, she begins the story in deficit — diminished, underestimated, unaware of what she actually carries inside her. And then, across hundreds of pages, she finds it. The latent power. The voice. The capacity she never knew she had because no one had ever reflected it back to her, or because the world had spent considerable energy convincing her it wasn't there.

I kept reading because I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop because I recognized her. I am on that exact quest. To uncover what's actually there. To stop performing a smaller version of myself because it's safer or more palatable or just easier than claiming the real thing. The FMC arc isn't fantasy to me. It's a roadmap.

So yes — the romantasy hole was life-sustaining. Now you know why.

What it also created was a low frequency that hummed under my skin constantly. A persistent tickle of inspiration and distraction that followed me through meetings, through conversations, through the ordinary texture of the day. Something else was trying to surface. I just didn't know what yet.

Until it dawned on me, somewhere around page ten thousand: the creatures and characters in these fantasy realms weren't fictional at all.

I'd met them. Repeatedly. Inside some of the largest organizations in the world, over twenty years of corporate living. They just hadn't had names before. Romantasy, it turns out, has a gift for naming things that corporate language carefully avoids — the predators, the performers, the hollow sovereigns, the ones who have perfected the appearance of power without ever actually wielding it.

A Court of Decks and Mirrors is what came out of that recognition. A satirical bestiary - a type of field guide for weary professionals — part dark fantasy, part professional reckoning — cataloguing the creatures and characters of the large enterprise court. Twelve entries so far. Each one a type you will recognize immediately if you have ever spent meaningful time inside a large organization. The Credit Wraith. The Strategy Phantom. The Glass King. The Thornback, to tease a few.

And then I did what every FMC eventually does: I stopped observing and started acting. Having connected so deeply with these Female Main Characters — women finding their footing, claiming their story, stepping into their own power — I felt an unexpected pull to tell my own. Not in words, at least not at first. In images and in the visual language of the very genre that had cracked me open.

So I dabbled. Tentatively at first, then with growing certainty, because what I found on the other side of that first experiment was a wealth of potential I hadn't anticipated. AI-generated, cinematic, dark and deliberate — a female figure moving through a torchlit corporate court, a library of leather-bound volumes, a tome opened to reveal the creatures inside. My observations, my story. Rendered in an aesthetic — gothic, dramatic, alluring— that strips away the corporate politeness that usually keeps these things safely unspoken. That's what this medium does. And I am only just getting started.

I'm telling you all of this because the Monthly Lift is supposed to be honest about the process, not just the product. And the honest truth is that the past six weeks have been some of the most creatively alive I've felt in years. The fantasy hole I fell willfully head first into wasn't a detour. It was a door — and what I found on the other side was a whole new way of seeing the work I've been doing all along, and an entirely new world to do it in.

Long story short: There's more coming. The Bestiary will keep growing. The videos will keep arriving. And something else is taking shape under the Second Flight umbrella that feels like the most natural extension of everything I've just described. In fantasy, alchemy is the art of transformation — of taking raw, imperfect materials and transmuting them into something rare and powerful. It's also, I've come to believe, exactly what the most compelling women I know have been doing quietly their whole lives. The Alchemy Sessions is a podcast about that process. Intimate, unpolished, and entirely intentional — conversations with women who have figured out something I haven't yet, about the specific kinds of courage it takes to live a full, complicated life. More on that very soon.

But for now: I'm back. And way more into cloaks, swordplay, and mating bonds than I was before.

— Shannon