Category: Obsessive-compulsive disorder

A Phone Anxiety Thriller Series Dictation in Progress

When the Terror in My Mind Has to Go Somewhere: Writing the Phone Anxiety Thriller Series

There are books I write because I’ve a story to tell. And then there are books I write because the story will not leave me alone. My Phone Anxiety Thriller series has become the latter. What began with the idea of turning something deeply uncomfortable, the fear and dread surrounding telephone communication, into suspense has grown into four novels: Where Voices Go to Hide, A Frequency of Secrets, Call Waiting, and Every Recording Has a Ghost.

Writing them has been challenging but also strangely addicting. So much so that it’s kept me up nights and driven me during the day as well. Sleep has been minimal for the past two months. Maybe that’s because these books don’t begin entirely with imagination but in the part of my mind that already understands what it feels like for a telephone to become something larger than a telephone.

For someone without phone anxiety, a ringing phone is simply a sound. For someone with it, that sound can become a warning.

  • Who is calling?
  • Why are they calling?
  • What happened?
  • What am I going to have to say?
  • What if I say the wrong thing?
  • What if something is wrong?
  • What if this call changes everything?

And sometimes the most frightening question is simply: What if I answer? That endless succession of possibilities is where these novels live.

Where Voices Go to Hide

Where Voices Go to Hide began with Elena Sterling, a woman who has spent much of her life avoiding telephone calls because talking on the phone creates something far more complicated than ordinary nervousness. In Elena’s world, she can hear what people are hiding beneath their spoken words. That premise allowed me to exaggerate something very real about anxiety: the constant attempt to interpret what another person really means.

  • A pause becomes suspicious.
  • A change in tone becomes evidence.
  • A delayed answer becomes meaningful.

A sentence gets replayed over and over long after the conversation has ended. Anxiety is extraordinarily talented at filling silence.

For Elena, those imagined spaces become literal. What she hears beneath conversations draws her into secrets, manipulation, disappearing women, and questions about whether the people closest to her can be trusted. But underneath the thriller is something much more familiar to me: the exhausting experience of analyzing communication until communication itself becomes frightening.

A Frequency of Secrets

Then came A Frequency of Secrets, which pushed the idea further.

Somerset Kinsley encounters voices beneath voices, versions of people who seem younger, older, frightened, dying, or ready to confess things they have never said aloud. The telephone becomes almost archaeological.

  • Every conversation contains another layer.
  • Every voice contains another possibility.
  • Every call might mean more than it appears to mean.

That concept came naturally because anxiety works much the same way. An anxious mind rarely accepts the first explanation. It digs. Then it digs beneath what it just discovered. Then it questions whether it should have been digging at all.

  • Someone says, “Everything is fine.” Anxiety asks: But why did they say it like that?
  • Someone does not return a call. Anxiety asks: What happened?
  • Someone calls unexpectedly. Anxiety asks: Why me? Why now?

By the time the mind has finished constructing possibilities, an ordinary situation can feel like the opening scene of a murder mystery. For a thriller writer, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, that is fertile ground.

Every Recording Has a Ghost

Then came Every Recording Has a Ghost. By this point I’d become fascinated not only with live telephone conversations but with recorded voices. A recording is supposedly fixed. The words have already been spoken. Nothing about them should change. And yet anyone who has ever replayed a voicemail, conversation, or recording while anxious knows that the experience can change every time you hear it. You notice another pause. Another breath, hesitation, and inflection. You begin wondering what happened immediately before the recording or immediately afterward.

You listen for what was not said. That became fertile territory for Every Recording Has a Ghost. The “ghost” doesn’t have to be something supernatural.

  • Sometimes the ghost is memory.
  • Sometimes it’s trauma.
  • Sometimes it’s guilt.
  • Sometimes it’s the person we were when something happened.
  • Sometimes it’s simply the meaning we attach to a voice because we can’t stop listening.

And sometimes what haunts a recording is the knowledge that whoever made it knew something we don’t.

Call Waiting

With Call Waiting, I found myself becoming even more interested in what happens psychologically before, during, and after telephone communication. Waiting can sometimes be worse than answering. There’s the anticipation of the phone ringing. The knowledge that someone may call. The uncertainty surrounding what they might say. The feeling that communication is approaching and there’s nowhere to hide from it. That is one of the reasons phone anxiety fascinates me so much as a foundation for psychological suspense. The terror does not require anything to actually happen. Anticipation can generate its own terror. The mind is capable of constructing an entire catastrophe while the telephone remains perfectly silent.

Call Waiting explores that psychological territory—the uncertainty, the listening, the expectation, and the terrible possibilities our minds manufacture when information is incomplete. Sometimes silence isn’t peaceful. Sometimes silence is where anxiety becomes loudest.

 

The Challenging Part of Writing These Books

Writing these novels hasn’t always been easy because I have to spend time inside thought patterns I already understand too well. Thriller writers deliberately ask themselves terrible questions.

  • What is the worst thing that could happen?
  • What is behind the door?
  • Who is lying?
  • Who can’t be trusted?
  • What does this clue really mean?
  • What happens if the protagonist is wrong?

Unfortunately, anxiety asks remarkably similar questions. That means there are moments when writing this series feels less like inventing fear and more like opening a door that is already inside my mind. Once I open it, everything comes rushing through. Ideas connect rapidly. One possibility produces another. A telephone call becomes a secret. The secret becomes a disappearance. The disappearance becomes a recording. The recording becomes evidence. The evidence becomes questionable. And suddenly I have fallen fifty pages into another psychological nightmare. That’s the challenging part. It’s also the addictive part.

I Have to Put the Terror Somewhere

There is something surprisingly freeing about giving anxiety a fictional destination. When frightening possibilities remain inside the mind, they can circle endlessly. On paper, they have somewhere to go. I can give them a house, a character, a telephone, a detective, a cassette, a recording, a crime, a beginning, and, eventually, an ending.

Perhaps that’s why I continue returning to this series. The terror in my mind has to get onto paper before it overtakes me. Writing gives it boundaries. Instead of allowing every what if to remain an unanswered question, I can turn the question into a plot.

One anxious question leads to another. Apparently, in my case, one anxious question also leads to another novel.

Why I Keep Writing the Phone Anxiety Thrillers

I don’t know that I will ever run out of material because phone anxiety isn’t simply about being afraid to make a telephone call. It can involve anticipation, avoidance, physical panic, obsessive thinking, rehearsing conversations, replaying conversations afterward, worrying about tone, imagining consequences, and constructing elaborate scenarios around very little information.

Those experiences are uncomfortable in real life. In fiction, they are almost perfectly designed for psychological suspense. A thriller depends upon uncertainty. So does anxiety. A thriller depends upon anticipation. So does anxiety. A thriller asks the reader to wonder what happens next. Anxiety does that relentlessly. Writing these books allows me to take that machinery and use it for something creative.

The fear still feels real. The thoughts can still arrive faster than I can organize them. But once they become Somerset’s problem, or Elena’s problem, or another character standing beside a ringing telephone wondering whether to answer it, they’ve entered another world. They’ve become fiction. And maybe that is the strangest thing I’ve learned from writing four Phone Anxiety Thrillers. The same mind that can frighten me can also create. The same imagination capable of constructing the worst possible outcome is capable of constructing an entire novel. So I keep writing. Because sometimes the phone rings inside your mind long before it rings in the room. And sometimes the only way I know how to silence it is to answer it on the page.

The Language of Survival: On Mental Illness, Resilience, and First Love

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I’ve always believed that the most courageous stories are not about rescue, but about return—how we come back to ourselves after the mind has turned against us. When I write about mental illness, I don’t write from a distance. I write from the thin edge of it—from the quiet hours where thought unravels and the only lifeline is language. Each of my novels—Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak—was born out of that liminal space between fear and faith, between survival and surrender.

These books aren’t companions by chronology, but by spirit. Each follows a young woman whose inner world threatens to eclipse the outer one, and each discovers that love—whether romantic, platonic, or self-forged—is the most powerful form of recovery we have.

1. The Mind as Haunted House: Secret Whispers

When I wrote Secret Whispers, I began with an image: a house stitched together by secrets, its silence louder than any scream. Inside it lives Adria—a painter, sister, caretaker, and reluctant witness to her own unraveling.

Schizophrenia shadows her family line, coiling like a whispered curse. Her brother’s breakdown has already split the household in half. Her mother holds everything together with brittle faith. And Adria, caught between caretaking and collapse, begins to hear the same whispers that once took him away.

I wanted to write honestly about what it means to live with a mind you can’t fully trust—the terror of not knowing whether what you see is symptom or sight. But I also wanted to write about love: the improbable, incandescent kind that dares to root itself in fractured soil.

In Secret Whispers, love doesn’t save Adria. It steadies her. The boy who sees her—awkward, hopeful, honest—doesn’t fix her illness; he becomes a mirror in which she can see more than diagnosis. Their love flickers like a candle in a draft, fragile yet real, proof that connection is possible even when perception splinters.

Adria’s resilience isn’t loud. It’s made of small gestures: washing a brush, opening a window, whispering not today when the shadows come. Recovery, I learned while writing her, is not a staircase but a spiral—you circle the same fears until you finally face them without flinching.

2. Déjà Vu: The Loops of the Bipolar Mind

If Secret Whispers was about hearing too much, Déjà Vu was about feeling too much—about living inside a mind where memory and mania blur.

Ivy Lancaster is eighteen, brilliant, impulsive, and newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She experiences life in echoes: every stranger’s face feels familiar, every nightmare seems rehearsed, every choice loops back like a record caught on its scratch.

The first time I wrote Ivy walking through the parking lot at dawn, barefoot and disoriented, I felt the pulse of the entire novel—this young woman spinning in the orbit of her own brain, terrified of herself yet desperate to be believed.

Déjà Vu is not just a psychological thriller; it’s an emotional x-ray of bipolarity. Mania is painted not as glamour but as velocity—the thrill that burns. Depression is written not as stillness but as suffocation. Yet in between, there’s the quiet miracle of awareness.

And there is love. Love arrives in Ivy’s world not as romance, but as recognition: people who refuse to define her by her disorder, who remind her that she exists beyond chemical imbalance. Love, in this book, is accountability—the friend who says take your meds, the parent who whispers you are more than your mind, the stranger who looks her in the eye when she feels invisible.

Resilience here is not recovery in the clinical sense. It’s survival as rebellion. It’s Ivy saying, I may live inside loops, but I can still choose where to step next.

When readers tell me Déjà Vu helped them feel seen—that it mirrored their manic spirals or the hollow aftermath—I’m reminded why I write these stories. To dismantle stigma. To remind us that living with mental illness is not a flaw in character, but a feat of endurance.

3. Of Laughter & Heartbreak: OCD and the Art of Staying

By the time I wrote Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I wanted to explore a different texture of the mind: the obsessive, ritualized patterns of control that masquerade as safety.

Stevie Matthews is almost sixteen. Her thoughts arrive like barbed wire; her rituals multiply like vines. When the summer’s order collapses, she’s hospitalized—a space she never asked for, but where, for the first time, she meets others who understand the language of compulsion.

OCD, for Stevie, is both prison and prayer. Her rituals aren’t about superstition; they’re about trying to keep the world from shattering. I wrote her story as both confession and communion—a letter to anyone who’s ever mistaken coping for control.

Behind those locked doors, Stevie meets her mirror selves: the anxious boy who collects facts like talismans, the quiet girl who hides notes to her future self, the nurse who knows that healing isn’t linear. Together they build something like family—a map stitched from shared fragments of hope.

This novel, like the others, carries the pulse of first love—not in grand gestures, but in small acts of belief. The hand that steadies hers during a panic spiral. The smile that says you are not too much. The love that grows not in spite of illness, but within it. Because love, at its truest, doesn’t demand wholeness—it meets you in the fragments and stays.

4. The Quiet Revolution of Survival

Each of these novels began with illness, but each ends with something larger: a reclamation of humanity.

In Secret Whispers, Adria learns that her art can hold what her mind cannot.
In Déjà Vu, Ivy redefines truth beyond the lens of mania.
In Of Laughter & Heartbreak, Stevie learns that control is not safety, and surrender is not defeat.

Together, they form a kind of triptych about resilience—the quiet kind that never makes headlines. They remind me that mental illness and first love often share the same vocabulary: vulnerability, risk, surrender, trust. Both require standing on the edge of the unknown and saying yes anyway.

To live with a brain that misfires is to live constantly between worlds—the real and the imagined, the lucid and the lost. Yet within that space, there’s beauty. There’s empathy. There’s art.

These are not stories about being cured. They’re stories about being human.

5. Why I Keep Writing

Sometimes readers ask why I return, again and again, to characters who struggle with their minds. My answer is simple: because I know what it means to stay.

Because the world still whispers that mental illness is weakness.
Because the stories that saved me were the ones that refused to flinch.
Because the young readers who see themselves in Adria, Ivy, and Stevie deserve to know they are not broken—they are becoming.

Writing these books has taught me that resilience isn’t the absence of relapse; it’s the decision to keep loving life anyway. It’s the courage to reach for connection even when your hands shake. It’s the soft defiance of building hope out of symptoms.

And maybe, at the center of it all, it’s first love—the thing that reminds us we’re still capable of wonder.

When I look back on Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I see not a trilogy of illness, but a mosaic of endurance. Each girl walks through her own labyrinth and emerges carrying the same small flame: belief.

Belief that we are more than diagnosis.
Belief that love is still possible in the dark.
Belief that the quiet work of staying—of waking up again, and again—is itself a form of grace.

If these stories have a single message, it’s this:
Even when the mind fractures, the heart remembers how to reach for light.

The Language of Healing: Finding Words for the Unspeakable

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There are wounds that refuse to speak in complete sentences. They hum beneath the skin, pulsing with memory, waiting for a language tender enough to hold them. For years, I mistook my silence for strength. I believed that if I didn’t name the pain, it couldn’t touch me. But silence, I learned, is its own kind of bruise—one that deepens in the dark.

Writing became my way of translating ache into alphabet. In Nostalgic Tendencies, Idyllic Endeavors & Current Inclinations, I began experimenting with what healing might sound like if given voice. I wasn’t trying to craft perfection; I was trying to survive. Each essay attempted to name something that had long lived without language—the complicated inheritance of womanhood, the confusion of growing up inside both trauma and tenderness, the way love and loss often share the same room.

The alphabetic structure of that book—A to Z—was more than a creative choice. It was a lifeline. Some days, I could only manage a single word: Ache. Anger. Acceptance. Other days, I could stretch into sentences. By giving shape to the unspeakable, I was teaching myself how to live with it. Naming became an act of reclamation; description became a prayer.

Later, in Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I found that healing sometimes requires fewer words, not more. Depression dismantled grammar; mindfulness rebuilt it one breath at a time. When I was too exhausted to write paragraphs, I wrote sensations instead: the hum of the refrigerator, the pulse in my wrists, the sparrow outside the window refusing to give up its song. I learned that attention itself is a language—one that says, I see you. I’m still here.

That book explored the intersection between narrative and neurobiology — how the act of observing, naming, and breathing can rewire a weary mind. Where Nostalgic Tendencies dissected the emotional architecture of becoming, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was about learning to dwell inside the body again, to replace self-critique with curiosity.

Words, I realized, are not cures. They’re companions. They sit beside the wound, whispering, You are not alone. The act of writing them—or reading them—becomes a ceremony of recognition. There’s something almost sacred about saying the truth out loud, even if it trembles. Because once a story is spoken, it stops being a secret.

Healing, I’ve learned, has its own dialect—part ink, part silence. It’s the pause between paragraphs, the tremor before truth, the deep exhale after naming something that once terrified you. And when we find that dialect—when we learn to speak our pain without fear of breaking the room—something miraculous happens: the language begins to speak us back into being.

Maybe this is why we keep writing, even when it hurts. Because language is how we build a bridge from what was unbearable to what might be beautiful again.

Of Laughter & Heartbreak book trailer

This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.

I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.

Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.

This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.

This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.

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When Characters Refuse to Stay Secondary: The Day One Draft Split Into Three Lives

Some stories begin with a single spark. For me, it was a scene in a psych ward where Nico and Zibby from The Cartography of First Love found themselves alongside Abigail Whimsy from Whimsy and Bliss and Aspen James from Shadows We Carry. At first, they shared the same space—four voices pressed together by circumstance, four fragile hearts mapping escape routes in whispers. But as I wrote, each one began to grow beyond the walls I had built, demanding not just a role in a shared narrative but the full breath of their own.

What began as one writing endeavor quickly branched into three novels. I realized I loved each of them too much to let them be shadows in someone else’s story. Nico and Zibby’s romance needed its own compass. Whimsy’s dreamlike adventures deserved to unfurl before her diagnosis became part of her arc. And Aspen’s haunted sketches needed the weight of silence and discovery only their own narrative could hold. By giving them individual pages, I gave them the freedom to tell me who they really were.

The backstories I first drafted in that shared ward became scaffolding—notes, fragments, hints of a life I would later let bloom fully. For Whimsy and Aspen, I wrote them at a point before hospitalization, while their lives were still luminous with magic and not yet marked by diagnosis, though Whimsy’s epilogue eventually folds that thread in. It was the only way to honor their wonder as much as their struggle. For Nico and Zibby, I leaned into the familiar rhythms of the ward itself—the routines, the hush, and the clamor—because their love story was inseparable from that claustrophobic yet strangely tender landscape.

Each character is close to my heart because their beginnings trace back to my own. I was hospitalized repeatedly between the ages of 13 and 15 for an eating disorder. I remember the unlikely friendships, the long hours, and the way we mapped impossible escape plans—California always our imagined salvation. Those memories, both heartrending and inspiring, found new breath through Zibby, Nico, Whimsy, and Aspen. What started as one shared room became three worlds, each carrying a piece of that past and reshaping it into a story.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Facts & How it Affects Me

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OCD is characterized by intrusive, troubling thoughts (obsessions), and repetitive, ritualistic behaviors (compulsions) which are time-consuming, significantly impair functioning and/or cause distress. The average onset of OCD is 19 years old and occurs slightly more often in females than in males. It affects 1 in 40 adults and 1 in 100 children.

When an obsession occurs, it almost always corresponds with a significant increase in anxiety and distress. Subsequent compulsions serve to reduce this associated anxiety/distress.

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Common obsessions include:

  • contamination fears
  • worries about harm to self or others
  • need for symmetry, exactness and order
  • religious/moralistic concerns
  • forbidden thoughts (can be sexual or aggressive)
  • a need to seek reassurance or confess

Common compulsions include:

  • cleaning/washing
  • checking
  • counting
  • repeating
  • straightening
  • routinized behaviors
  • confessing
  • praying
  • seeking reassurance
  • touching
  • tapping or rubbing
  • avoidance

Many people with OCD recognize that it isn’t rational but continue to need to act on their obsessions with their corresponding compulsions and may spend lengthy amounts of time, like several hours daily, performing senseless rituals. OCD can be chronic and interfere with a person’s schoolwork, job, family, or social activities. Proper treatment with medication or cognitive-behavioral therapy can help sufferers regain control over the illness and feel relief from the symptoms.

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My onset was also at 19 years old despite occasional cutting (of my thighs) as a younger teenager. The bulk of my OCD began when with dealing with an alcoholic spouse. I’d start worrying about a fire in the apartment and what the police or firefighters would walk into, so I repetitively cleaned, straightened, and reorganized many times so they wouldn’t think low of me. At 21 years old, when my daughter was born, I worried something bad would happen to her; so I began touching a set of feng-shui coins tied in a red ribbon that I’d nailed to the entry door trim. Then I established the handwashing routine where I’d scrub roughly for eighteen minutes. After that the tapping the table eight times began.

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When I returned to college at age twenty-six, I’d avoid certain hallways and walk unnecessarily around campus as opposed to direct paths. When I had to take the quick routes for social reasons, I’d ask for reassurance that nothing bad would occur. Two years later, after I filed for divorce, I sought help so others wouldn’t see my compulsions. The psychiatrist prescribed SSRIs which eased a good deal of the more embarrassing situations.

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Now, I take Zoloft (serotonin) and Wellbutrin (dopamine) for the chemical imbalances in my brain. Those are an immense help. Now the social disturbances are almost non-existent unless an event occurs that stresses me beyond normal levels, such as my daughter receiving radiation therapy or immunotherapy. The only thing that I compulsively perform is touching the coins when I leave or enter. The reasoning behind that is that nothing will happen to my loved ones. I realize it’s irrational, but I can’t quite handle that obsession and compulsion yet.

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My point is that help is available. You may not be cured, but a combination of medications and cognitive-behavioral therapy may treat it to the point of others not observing your behaviors, especially in confined spaces like classes, meetings, or elevators.

Enjoyed this post? Why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, my writing memoirs, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , or AllAuthor.

Book review: Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne

Usborne Publishing, 2015

Is it a good idea to go off medication? Probably not. Would about when you’re trying something new? Especially not. For the sixteen-year-old protagonist in this YA novel, Evie, like most of us, just wants to be normal as she’s starting off new at school. Left behind is the label of the “girl who went crazy.” Nobody at her new school knows about her diagnosis of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). So she’s making friends, going to parties, and thinking about a relationship. But if she can’t even open up to her friends about her diagnosis, how can she be in a relationship?

As an OCD sufferer myself, I found this YA novel comforting and relatable in the fact that I’m not alone. But the downside is my obsessions and compulsions got intertwined with those Evie experiences. So, this book has a trigger warning. All in all, it should help non-sufferers to experience what people like Evie and I go through daily. It’s openness about mental health issues is refreshing but with this illness in particular society has gone too far in taking it on as a typical characteristic by saying things like “I’m so OCD because I have to have my desk a certain way.” Doing so minimizes how severe and debilitating OCD actually is.

This tearjerker of a book takes you into the character’s mind at her most difficult times. We get to experience if only momentarily, the “bad thoughts” that Evie dwells on as well as the occasional “good thought.” We know what Evie really thinks about a situation and how she deals with it, which really makes one ruminate. And lastly, this book doesn’t play up mental illness or relationships as the be all end all well of happiness and jubilation. It is more realistic.