✨ The Alchemy of Ink and Words

Volume I – Chapter One: The Matchmaker and the Parrot

T.L. Johnson

Jul 01, 2025

“The disguises we wear are not always born of deception. Sometimes they’re stitched from the threads of longing.”

🪶 The Chapter Has Landed

It’s time.
Chapter One of The Matchmaker and the Parrot is here in full.

This first installment introduces us to Maurice Heartman Cicero—matchmaker, romantic philosopher, subtle con artist, and perhaps… something else entirely.

He wasn’t born in velvet. He wasn’t raised among scholars. He didn’t even begin life with the name Maurice.
No, he came from salted docks and storm-churned coasts. Born Albert Heartman, he’s a man who rewrote his life in ink, silk, and reinvention—and somewhere along the way, acquired a parrot with a peculiar gift.

This story is about appearances, intentions, and the strange alchemy that turns performance into meaning.

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💬 Why Start Here?

I’ve had this character—Maurice—scribbled in the margins of old notebooks for years. He arrived with a mustache, a secret, and an agenda, but no clear story. It wasn’t until the parrot showed up that I realized: this wasn’t just about matchmaking—it was about identity, deception, vulnerability… and the absurdly human quest for love.

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🔍 A Teaser from Chapter One:

Maurice Heartman Cicero wore a small, dark mustache that curled like punctuation above his pointed goatee—an exclamation at the end of a carefully composed face…
He had been born Albert Heartman—a name more suited, he always thought, to a man who sold bacon, or perhaps oversaw the king’s tithings in a dusty back office where love was weighed by the pound and taxed accordingly…
It was the parrot who was the wonder.

📖 Read Chapter One Now:

👉Click here to read Chapter 1 of The Matchmaker and the Parrot

🖋️ Behind the Curtain

If you’re following The Alchemy of Ink and Words as a series, don’t worry—next week we return to the “process” side of things. I’ll share reflections from writing Chapter 3 and reveal how an offhand line about tea turned into a character’s defining moment.

For now, enjoy the first act.

If you stumble upon a shack along the coast whose proprietor is fluent in parrot, step inside and experience the magic within.

Please let me know what you think and hit that like button. Thank you for your support.