Post-apocalyptic wastelands ruled by AI. Cursed kingdoms where the Fae are forced into hiding to escape their hunters. Heroes punished for feeling too much or rattling the bars of their invisible cages. Love that defies all odds, even when fate itself is against it.
I’ve always been drawn to characters that are touched by a hint (or heavy helping) of darkness and were filled with yearning. I cheered for their redemption arcs or hopes for a better future. I wanted them to get their happy endings, whatever they were, though they hardly did. As a young goth-ling, I emulated Anne Rice and wrote stories of tragic vampires filled with despair and ennui, looking for love. Later, I took those same types of characters, made them human, and added the campy humor of The Shoebox Project (iykyk). I dabbled in MCR and A7X fanfic. I ported my characters into tabletop RPGs. My stories became grittier, set in dystopian worlds inspired by 1984, Brave New World, Futu.re, and Red Rising. Others inhabited cursed lands or satirical boardrooms. But always, the same themes remained: yearning characters with trauma and tragedy overcoming their darkness and finding the people who loved them through it all.
Despite early awards for my writing, once the teen years hit, the old “writers don’t make money” was drummed into me. My mother threw away every scrap of my writing she found and even stood over my shoulder to make sure I really did delete all my accounts on LiveJournal, Elfwood, DeviantArt, or anywhere else I posted my stories. Spending my time writing about fictional lives wasn’t normal and wasn’t productive, would not help me marry a doctor or lawyer, and most of all, would not afford me the money to later divorce them (no wonder I always loved the romance…).
But I didn’t stop writing. Instead, I did it in secret, squirreling away my words and burying my dreams, unironically yearning for a time when I could finally let them fly. It turns out that that moment came when I became a mom, after losing myself in motherhood as so many women do, and then realizing I had to do something for me. I had to find my own passion, my own voice again, and set an example for my daughter in following my own dreams.
After years of hiding my writing, I’m finally ready to let it into the light–which is both exciting and terrifying.
I want to touch lives. I want my readers to feel something. I want them to have companions in their darkness and trauma, and find hope even when there seems to be none. Spike might not have had his happy ending with Buffy, and neither did Erik in Phantom of the Opera. But my characters will always find their people and their happy endings, no matter how hopeless it might seem.
When I’m not busy putting my characters through the ringer, I enjoy gardening, playing TTRPGs, reading (I’m in my spicy book era), being a wife, mother, and am probably being (willfully) distracted from doing the dishes.