I couldn't make this stuff up. Really.

So last night while out at the pub with some friends, London accused me of lying on this blog.

I was quite offended, to put it mildly.

It has since occurred to me, however, that just because he's the only one that said it doesn't mean he's the only one who's thinking it. So I'm on here now when I ought to be reading about the Flavian Amphitheater (a.k.a., the Colosseum) that yes, you're going to have to take my word for it, but every goddamn word I write here is a truth.

It's not just a matter of personal pride, though that is a substantial part of it. It's professional pride, too. As a young writer building an online platform, I have every reason to post the most engaging stories I can come up with--but they have to be true. If I let the Ranshous family motto ("Never let the truth get in the way of a good story") sway me into stretching the truth here, and a future employer (hopefully someone in the publishing industry) found out after s/he used my blog as an example of my writing--well, I can easily imagine getting into a lot of trouble for that.

So that's the logical explanation. But really, I would just--I could never lie on here. There's no point in making up stories. This is just as much for Future Me as it is for everyone else who's currently reading it, because I want to be able to scroll back through all these posts when I'm back in Santa Barbara and maybe just... disappear into the past for an hour or so.

And really, if I started making stuff up, there would be vampires and faeries munching on people. Anybody who knows me know that. :)