Moya awakens

Here I give you an insight into the first chapter of my new children's book.

The following image won't be part of the picture later, but it's relevant for now. I just found the drawing again.

Chapter 1

The desire for awakening

Moya was a character in a novel. She lived in letters. She only woke when someone read her. But she had been asleep for a very long time, for the pages she lay in remained closed. What's more, they hadn't even become pages yet. They were files in a PC, stored on a drive. There, Moya eked out her existence among everything she was destined to experience and learn. She was trapped. She felt everything as if beneath a simmering surface. She longed to experience everything written on the pages that followed, but she couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and couldn't truly live.

Moya's life consisted of millions of letters. She felt them within her, beside her, above and below her.

But no one put them together; everything remained like a large puzzle, in which she was stuck as a large piece. There were only letters and no time. Time would only begin for Moya when someone read her on a computer, gave her life, or when she was printed on pages and read that way.

Her creator had decided that Moya shouldn't be released to the public yet, that no one should read or see her yet. Why?

Moya had been waiting for almost twelve years to see the light of day, her world. In many confused dreams, she had raced through her letters, searching for what lay before her and what lay behind her. But everything was one. A single, large file. As vast as the infinite starry sky, like a galaxy her creator had written about in other novels.

Moya had managed to travel in dreams and explore further letters, sentences, texts, and stories fragmentarily at their edges. In doing so, she had encountered other beings who had stared at her as if from flashes of alien files: a spaceship pilot named "Anna," a tiger, sailors, a pirate, and many people whose names had flickered above them: Finn, Solveig, Sadmaari, and many more. These characters, too, came from their creator.

Moya knew the ONE existed. Because she had been able to see her through a tiny camera and sometimes even through the large screen.

It was a human being with a large face. The creator was a hundred times Moya's size, yet sometimes she was smaller when Moya thought of her. Because she was angry at the ONE. Why had she created Moya, only to leave her lying among all the other files like a rotten apple in a meadow?

(...)

When the creator opened her Rodiwana files, she was still stuck in the Lando novels, which were set long before Moya's time. Lando was Moya's ancestor. He was a man who loved nature just as much as Moya. Only he lived on the east coast of Rodiwana and in the jungle, and he was a better horseman than she was.

Since the many brick houses had disappeared behind the window and only trees were visible, Moya knew that the ONE was suddenly no longer living in the city, but in the forest. Now she herself would have moved into "Isobald's Hut at the Ice Forest" and landed in the middle of her own Rodiwana. That's what the Creator had written.

Yet her house was not only located near the forest, like Isobald's hut in the Northland, but also, like Moya's house, on the edge of the Wolfsgrad Steppe and the Wana Forest. Didn't she see that? Why did she always mention the clever Isobald and not even mention the as yet unpublished Moya?

Of course, Moya's creator didn't live in the utopian "Rodiwana," but in the real world. But she still hadn't found her way back to the source of her writing, which was Moya.

(...)

I wrote the entire book from October 22nd to October 28th, 2025. Now I'm going to illustrate it. Sometimes thoughts find me that I wasn't looking for. In this case, my Moya (from my yet-to-be-published Rodiwana series, part 3 of the trilogy based on the Lando series) catches up with me, and I'm grateful for that, because she's here with me. And sometimes you find more when you're not looking at all. Then it finds you. ... You might read what happens next in book form soon. I don't know yet how long the illustrations will take. Best wishes from Moya and me!

Bente Amlandt is Telse Weinreich on October 28, 2025