Last October, I finished a novel.
It had been through multiple rounds of edits and revisions. A cover was designed. The Library of Congress issued a catalog number. Physical proof copies arrived at my door—those final editions you hold in your hands, checking margins and fonts, preparing to approve what will become the real thing.
And then it sat.
I had other novels ahead of it in the queue, so I let it marinate. But honestly? Something about it felt off. Not bad. Just... off.
The story was...
I started with a writer.
Not myself — I'm no Graham Tierney. I don't have a seven-book series set in Renaissance Florence. I've never had an HBO option. No one has ever come to me, book in hand, and told me that something I wrote changed their life. That some character I'd created had given them permission to feel something they'd been afraid to feel.
But I know what it's like to lose someone. I know grief — the kind that doesn't announce itself, the kind that just moves in and rearranges...
People sometimes ask where stories come from. The honest answer is usually everywhere and nowhere—a convergence of memory and moment that you couldn't have planned if you'd tried.
Last summer, I took my nephew on a seventy-one-mile canoe trek through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, crossing between Minnesota and Canada. It was his first time doing something this monumental—days of paddling through waters I've known for decades, making camp on shores that have shaped me in ways I'm...
People sometimes ask me what kind of writer I am. It's a fair question—one I've grappled with myself. Am I a romance writer? A literary fiction author? Someone who dabbles in the paranormal? Looking at my catalog, the answer isn't immediately obvious. I've written about vampires in London, ghosts in Indiana, and a nine-year-old boy trying to survive a Midwestern winter. But beneath the surface differences, there's a thread that runs through everything I write.
My work...