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I sat back in my chair as I looked over the first draft of my thesis. "People of the Myth: A Comparative Analysis of Heroes and Villains in Legend, Lore, and Popular Culture," I wrinkled my nose as I said the title out loud. It sounded so pretentious. I had taken a leap of faith when I presented this topic to the head of the Applied Anthropology department. Most of my classmates had given highly academic proposals raging from the underground economy to how traditions are determined by cultures, while I had given in to my addiction to books. Well, that and a tinge of laziness.

I worked a full-time job at my family's small book shop so taking on a class to earn a second bachelor's degree was an exercise in madness. But I loved finding out what made people tick, so going back to school to study Applied Anthropology was something I had always wanted to do. I'd put it off for a few years so I could help get the store back in the black again, but realized that I could not live my life looking at spreadsheets and accounting ledgers. The logical side of me loved being an accountant, but the romantic side loved stories.

I was surprised when my professor agreed to my choice of subject. Happy too, because this meant that my primary source of research material included movies, television shows, and even comic books. But now, after all the outlines I wrote, nothing was coming to me. I looked at the notebook where I had scribbled down the topics that made it to my final outline, and the last thing I felt like doing was hunkering down to write technical text about the similarities between Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Luke Skywalker. I sighed. But force myself I did, and for the next couple of hours, my empty flat was filled with nothing but the sound of my fingers quickly tapping out sentences from the keyboard of my laptop.

As with all writing, I struggled for the first couple of days, but then I hit my stride and slid into a pattern: work in the morning, classes and paper consultations in the afternoon, and write in the evening. It never occured to me that my life was boring. I liked the predictability of my schedule, and knew that if I ever wanted to take a day off from one of my duties, it would be easy to slip back into my routine to catch up.

But a pattern-even to those who liked to keep to a schedule-can be monotonous, and tonight my brain rebelled at the thought of having to go through too much rersearch and related literature readings. I gave up after two hours, accepting the fact that my brain was fried and I would be unable to make much more headway into my paper.

I closed the word processing program and opened my music cache. I found the playlist I was looking for and soon, the sounds of the songs I loved filled the air. I sipped at my hot chocolate-which had now grown cold-took my hair down from its usual bun at the nape of my neck, and pulled up a file from my "Miscellaneous" folder. "Legends," the story I had been writing in secret for the past few weeks blossomed on the screen, and I had to smile.

It was so unlike me, fictionalizing the life of a man I had admired for so long. Arthur Pendragon was the golden boy of business. His succession of his father to become the head of Pendragon Industries gave the business world some much needed charisma.

"Guinevere, mark my words, that boy is the Tiger Woods of industry," my father once said.

A strange and somewhat disjointed analogy, but it made sense. I admired his tenacity. His shrewdness shone through during interviews, and even when he was being grilled by the toughest of market analysts on television, he never flinched. He sat ramrod straight, looked at his interviewer in the eye, and gave answers that were much too logical to be rehearsed. I admit that I was smitten. The fact that he looked like he did didn't help my illogical heart. Golden hair, clear blue eyes (the bluest I had ever seen), and a shy, almost boyish smile capped off what was obviously a brilliant mind. I fell hard and swift.

But my thoughts and fantasies of Arthur Pendragon never made it to my ordered life. They were kept to moments like these, when I was alone and free to let my imagination run free. For the most part, it worked well for me. And the story I was writing about him was just that, fantasy. Arthur Pendragon was a dream, a dream that must have been shared with other women all over the world, but when I was alone and living my other life as LadyInLavender, he was all mine.

I smiled again and sipped at my cold drink. It wasn't bad, but it lost much of its allure now that it wasn't warm and comforting.

I put my feet up on my chair and wrapped my arms around my legs, resting my chin on my knees. I carefully pondered how I was going to write the next few chapters of Legends. So far, I had gotten Arthur to battle a griffin and test his mettle against other magical beings, so now what?

I pulled out another notebook and considered the notes I had made there. A laugh escaped my lips as I looked down at my handwriting: introduce love interest, I had underlined the words three times. I put my feet down and pulled my chair closer to my desk. Yes. "Prince" Arthur definitely needed a romantic partner.

My fingers were soon flying across the keyboard as I wrote about a maid with dusky skin, dark, curly hair, and the compulsion to say what was on her mind. This was fanfiction, after all. If I couldn't put a bit of myself into one of the characters, it wouldn't be true to the genre. Besides, it was only a physical resemblance. And really, it's not like anyone who actually knew Arthur Pendragon would read it.