Last year, I shut down my online shop business. There were plenty of reasons — most of them orbiting the same gravitational truth: I couldn’t maintain it properly, and I didn’t want it drifting in the void, untended. I needed space to figure out what I was really building.
Scroll forward to June 2025.
Now I’m deep into Realmscapes — the world I’ve always wanted to make. It started as an experiment and has grown into the creative ecosystem I wish I’d built in 2015 when I first began blogging. It’s a place where all my work can live — as long as I can connect it to one of my imaginative realms.
But quietly running alongside that growth has been something more personal. One of my long-term goals — one I haven’t shared before — is to help young women who are in disadvantageous situations. I came from such a place. I know how hard it is to get started when you’re barely scraping by. I joined the Air Force at nineteen, not because I dreamed of military life, but because I needed a bed and food and a shot at survival. If someone had shown me that a creative path was possible… I don’t know exactly how things might have unfolded, but I know I would’ve made different choices.
That’s where Studio Second Street comes back in.
This time, it isn’t just a shop. It’s part of a long-term goal — a creative project with a real-world objective: to eventually fund support for young women trying to get a foothold. The shop keeps its name — Studio Second Street — originally chosen in honor of my Nana, who believed in me when few others did. That name, in itself, is a link to who I am and what I hope this project can grow into.
So where does it fit in Realmscapes?
At first, I wasn’t sure. Realmscapes is an evolving portfolio of stories, drawings, zines, and quiet rebellion. Was a shop a strange interloper? Was this another one of those projects that had to live in a separate corner of the internet?
But no — because the shop, the zines, the site, the stories — they all come from the same place: me.
I’ve been down this road before. In 2017, I had five different websites — one for art, one for writing, one for Zen philosophy, one for family ancestry, and one for knitting. I thought I needed separation. In truth, I needed connection. What I really needed was a creative world big enough to hold it all — the full, chaotic constellation of what I make and believe in.
Some creators worry that if they combine their interests, they’ll confuse or lose their audience. But maybe the better question is: do you want to chase an audience, or build a world that’s worth inviting someone into?
So yes, The Curious Studio of Second Street is now a Realm — one more doorway in the Realmscapes landscape. But it's not the only project that needed a home.
Now that the Aliki book is, er, in long-term editing, the online zines have taken over the Realmscapes Substack. When I started making them, I didn’t know they’d evolve into Dispatches from the Free Fictional Frontier — but they did.
And the studio itself — the actual place where I create — is both a literal and symbolic doorway into the kind of creative life I wish I’d known was possible at nineteen.
If you’re wondering how your own projects connect… maybe the answer isn’t to separate them. Maybe the answer is to make a world where they already belong.
