The Map Beneath the Story: How I Write My Way Through Vienna
A letter from Vienna on memory, place, and how stories begin before we understand them.
When I walk Vienna’s streets, I carry more than a route.
I carry the places that have shaped me and the stories they asked me to tell.
Not all of them are famous.
Some are barely marked. A staircase behind a hospital. A gate that only opens at dusk. A maze where I once got lost, not physically, but emotionally in the best possible way.
These places hold something invisible.
They are not landmarks.
They are memory anchors.
Not a Path. A Pattern.
I used to think that writing a book meant following a path.
Now I think it’s more like tracing a pattern, one you feel before you fully understand.
Understanding Vienna didn’t begin with outlines or titles.
It began with moments:
The candle I lit in St. Marx Cemetery without knowing who I was mourning
A boy’s imagined footsteps through the Schönbrunn Maze, whispering a story into being
The echo of a violin where history once fell silent
And so I started collecting these places.
Pinning them on a map — not just by location, but by emotion.
Where do stories begin?
Not with structure, but with sensation.
The Map I’m Building
This autumn, I’ll release a visual layer of Understanding Vienna that I’ve never shared publicly:
🗺 The Story Map.
It’s part travel guide, part archive, part emotional atlas.
You’ll see:
Where The Czardas Cats began (a vinyard in the clouds filled with feline muses)
Where Walk Through Time unfolds in concentric circles of memory
Where a future story about a girl, a ghost, and a mermaid waits by the Adriatic sea
Each symbol — a paw print, a spiral, a violin scroll — holds a story.
But more than that, they hold feeling.
This isn’t about tourism. It’s about orientation.
About asking: Where do I enter? What do I carry? And where will this story leave me?
You Have a Map, Too
We all do.
Maybe yours isn’t drawn yet.
But you know it by heart.
That hallway in the school where you learned to listen
That trail where you said a quiet goodbye
That room where a story began and never quite let go
Mapping a story isn’t about control.
It’s about relationship.
With place. With memory. With change.
A Question for You
If you could draw one place on your emotional map this week, what would it be?
Not your favorite place.
Not your most “important” one.
Just one that still glows softly in your chest, like a lantern behind a curtain.
I’d love to know.
Feel free to reply, or whisper it into your notebook.
(Or both.)
And if you’d like to follow this unfolding universe, the Story Map preview is coming soon.
Until then, keep walking gently.
Yours in wonder,
Yolanda
The Art of Weaving Stories
✨ PS
If you missed it:
📍 Whispers in the Maze is the first story born from this mapping method and it is currently being expanded a sample seek peak is coming soon. For now here is a teaser:
Whispers in the Maze
It started with a whisper.
Not in a library. Not in the council chamber.
In the kitchens of Schönbrunn Palace—between the soup and the strudel.
Three children.
A vanished apprentice.
And Mozart, who refused to stop whistling.
They appeared without warning.
One of them solved a cipher even the Emperor couldn’t.
One claimed to have spoken to the Empress…in the future.
Maria Theresia ordered an inquiry.
Because the maze had started humming.
And because, more dangerously than anything else…
…these children believed they belonged.
This is not just a story about time travel.
It’s about belonging, disruption, and the strange courage it takes to change the shape of history.
🗺️ The full Story Map will go live with the Understanding Vienna site launch this September.
Follow along if you’d like to walk that map with me.