Category: survival

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.

Every Recording Has a Ghost: When Trauma Changes What We Hear and Remember

There is something unsettling about an old recording. A photograph freezes what someone looked like. A recording does something different. It brings the person back into the room with their breathing, pauses, and hesitation before answering a question. Their voice hasn’t aged even though everyone who heard it the first time has.

That idea sits at the center of my forthcoming, soon-to-be-released novel, Every Recording Has a Ghost, which kept me up nights to complete because of the intensity and proximity the subject is for me. The ghosts in this book aren’t necessarily the kind that walk through walls. Some of them live in memory. Some live in trauma. And some were deliberately put there by other people.

The Real Mental Illness Beneath the Suspense

Every Recording Has a Ghost follows podcaster Remy Ireland as she becomes caught in a mystery involving old cassette recordings, a psychiatric hospital, missing information, manipulated memories, and a past she has never fully escaped.

Remy also lives with something much less mysterious: anxiety. For her, the telephone itself can be a source of dread. Calling a stranger, being transferred, waiting on hold, wondering whether she’s explaining herself correctly, and hearing the ringing continue while she waits for someone to answer. These aren’t supernatural experiences. They’re recognizable forms of anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders involve more than ordinary temporary worry. They can persist, become difficult to control, and interfere with work, relationships, school, and everyday life. NIMH estimates that roughly 31% of American adults experience an anxiety disorder sometime during their lives.

And mental illness as a whole is far from rare. The latest available national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 23.4% of U.S. adults—about 61.5 million people—experienced a mental illness during 2024. About 14.6 million experienced a serious mental illness. That means mental illness isn’t some unusual condition belonging only to characters in frightening books. It is part of ordinary families, workplaces, marriages, and lives. That distinction matters to me when I write psychological suspense.

Trauma Doesn’t Always Stay in the Past

One of the ideas running through Every Recording Has a Ghost is that something can be over and still not be finished. Trauma works that way. Someone can leave a hospital, leave a relationship, survive an accident, grow older, move away, build an entirely different life, and still discover that the nervous system remembers things the conscious mind would rather forget.

People exposed to traumatic events can experience anxiety, anger, sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts, and heightened reactions afterward. Most people’s reactions lessen with time, but when symptoms persist and significantly interfere with daily functioning, they may become part of post-traumatic stress disorder. People with PTSD can experience frightening memories, emotional numbness or detachment, sleep disturbances, and an exaggerated startle response.

That exaggerated awareness of possible danger is especially important to Remy’s story. Because once someone has learned that something terrible can happen, the brain can become very good at watching for the next terrible thing. A ringing telephone can stop being merely a telephone. A hallway can stop being merely a hallway. A person’s tone of voice can become evidence. And a cassette tape can become something you are almost afraid to play.

When the Brain Starts Searching for Threat

One of the strangest things about anxiety is that it can make uncertainty feel dangerous. You don’t know what the person on the other end of the telephone will say, why someone hasn’t answered, what is hidden on a recording, or whether the pause you heard meant anything. The anxious brain often wants an explanation immediately. And when it doesn’t get one, it starts creating possibilities. What if something happened? What if I misunderstood? What if they are angry? What if I said the wrong thing? What if this means something worse?

That thought pattern can create an exhausting cycle in which uncertainty produces anxiety, anxiety increases vigilance, and vigilance discovers even more things to worry about. It’s one reason Remy’s phone anxiety matters so much to Every Recording Has a Ghost. Her fear isn’t simply a character quirk. It affects the way she investigates. The way she communicates. The way she interprets silence. And sometimes the hardest thing she does isn’t entering an abandoned place or listening to a frightening tape. Sometimes it is simply staying on the telephone.

Memory Is Not a Recording

There is another psychological idea underneath the novel that fascinates me even more. We like to imagine memory as a recording. Something happened. The brain saved it. Years later, we retrieve the file. But human memory doesn’t work exactly that way. Memories can be influenced by attention, emotion, later information, context, suggestion, and the circumstances in which we remember them. That doesn’t mean memory is meaningless. It means memory is human. And that creates frightening possibilities when another person holds authority over the environment in which those memories are being formed.

That possibility becomes much darker inside the psychiatric institution Remy investigates. The hospital archive contains thousands of recordings. Patients were observed, conversations were preserved, identities were manipulated, recordings were edited, and the deeper Remy goes into the archive, the more she begins to understand that the supposedly supernatural story surrounding the hospital may have provided perfect camouflage for something much more human: control.

The Hospital Is Frightening Because People Had Power

I deliberately didn’t want the psychiatric hospital in Every Recording Has a Ghost to be frightening simply because mentally ill people had once lived there. Mental illness isn’t the horror. Vulnerability being exploited is. There is an important difference. The frightening part of the hospital’s history is what can happen when vulnerable people are placed in an environment where someone else controls information, medication, observation, access, interpretation, and authority.

In the novel, sedation, repetition, recorded material, surveillance, and psychological pressure are used together in ways they never should be. It isn’t magic or a supernatural machine capable of instantly controlling someone’s mind; instead, it’s coercion. And that is more disturbing to me. Because human beings don’t need supernatural powers to damage one another. Sometimes they only need access, authority, and someone who isn’t being believed.

What About Hearing Voices?

Because Every Recording Has a Ghost deals so heavily with voices and recordings, there’s another real-world distinction worth making. Hearing a voice that no one else hears can occur as an auditory hallucination. Hallucinations are one possible symptom of psychosis, a group of symptoms involving disrupted perception and thinking and, at times, difficulty distinguishing what is real from what is not. But hearing voices does not automatically mean schizophrenia.

Psychosis can occur in several mental illnesses, and NIMH notes that psychotic symptoms can also be associated with neurological conditions, severe sleep deprivation, some medications, and substance use. A person can also experience psychosis without ultimately being diagnosed with schizophrenia. That distinction is important. Mental illness is far more complicated than the shorthand often used in thrillers and horror stories. And a person experiencing hallucinations is still a person—not a plot device, a threat, or a monster.

In Every Recording Has a Ghost, that uncertainty becomes part of the suspense. When Remy hears something disturbing, the question isn’t automatically: Is she losing her mind? The better questions are: What did she actually hear? Who recorded it? Was it altered? Who wants her to doubt herself? And perhaps most importantly: Who benefits if nobody believes her?

When Other People Define Your Reality

That may be the mental-health theme of this novel that affects me most. There’s something terrifying about being told that your own perception can’t be trusted. Maybe you’re overreacting, misunderstood, remembering it incorrectly. Maybe anxiety is making you imagine things or the recording never said what you thought it said. Sometimes those statements can be true. Anxiety can distort perception. Memory can be imperfect. Mental illness can affect the way someone experiences reality. But those facts can also be weaponized. A person’s diagnosis should never mean that everything they say can automatically be dismissed.

That distinction becomes increasingly important for Remy as she uncovers what happened inside the hospital. Because once people know you’re frightened, anxious, traumatized, or psychologically vulnerable, it becomes very easy for someone acting in bad faith to say: See? That’s why she thinks this happened. And suddenly the illness becomes more believable than the witness.

Why Recordings?

I keep coming back to recordings because they seem permanent. You can doubt a memory, question a witness, and argue about what somebody thought they heard twenty years ago. But then someone presses PLAY. There’s the voice, breath, room noise, interruption, and sentence that shouldn’t be there. And suddenly the past has evidence. At least, we want to believe it does. But recordings can be edited too. They can be taken out of context. Someone can decide when to begin recording and when to stop. A person asking the questions can influence the answers. A tape can preserve the truth. It can also preserve someone’s version of it. That ambiguity is where Every Recording Has a Ghost lives.

The Ghost May Be the Person You Used to Be

There’s another kind of ghost in the novel: the earlier version of ourselves, the nineteen-year-old who was terrified, the person who didn’t know what was happening yet, who believed an authority figure, who kept quiet, and who survived something and then spent years trying to make it smaller. Trauma can create a strange relationship with time. Something that happened decades earlier can suddenly feel emotionally close when a reminder brings it forward. A voice can do that, as can music, a smell, a room, a telephone ringing, or an old cassette with your name written across it.

That is the part of Every Recording Has a Ghost that feels most real to me. We carry earlier versions of ourselves everywhere. Most days they remain quiet. Then something presses PLAY.

Every Recording Has a Ghost

The title began as something eerie. The longer I worked on the book, the more literal it became in a completely different way. Every recording contains someone who no longer exists exactly as they did when it was made. The person has aged, changed, recovered, forgotten, remembered differently, disappeared, or died, but the recording hasn’t moved. It waits. And when someone listens again, the past and present occupy the same room.

That is where Remy Ireland finds herself in Every Recording Has a Ghost. She begins by investigating recordings. Eventually, she realizes the recordings are investigating her past too. The novel contains mystery, cold cases, an abandoned institutional history, manipulated audio, hidden surveillance, phone anxiety, trauma, memory, and voices that seem impossible to explain. But beneath all of that is something much more ordinary. The human need to understand what happened to us. And the fear that once we finally know the truth, we may never be able to put it back where we found it. Because sometimes a ghost isn’t a dead person. Sometimes it is a memory that finally found its voice.

Echoes Along the Shore book release

The forests whisper, rivers bleed, and Superior keeps its echoes. Campers think they’re hunting a killer, but the wilderness hides more than storms. In the mist, one truth cuts clear: the danger is already among them.

Some places keep secrets. This one keeps the dead.

Echoes Along the Shore is a place-driven psychological thriller where the landscape exerts agency, truth emerges through pattern recognition, and survival is both the protagonist’s greatest strength—and her most dangerous liability. The same instincts that kept her alive are pulling her deeper

They came for fresh air, campfires, and peace.
They found that some campers won’t survive the weekend.
And one of them may never have planned to.

On the edge of Lake Superior, the next echo could be your last.

After surviving a string of brutal murders in their hometown, Leah, Nick, and Jake escape north, hoping the vast wilderness of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region will offer peace to forest bathe. Instead, the forests of Tettegouche and the roaring rivers bleeding into the great lake draw them into a nightmare more cunning than anything they left behind.

Gripping, atmospheric, and merciless, Echoes Along the Shore is a psychological survival thriller that asks: what if the deadliest predator isn’t lurking in the woods at all, but stoking a fire nearby?

Perfect for readers of atmospheric psychological thrillers, survival suspense, and character-driven mysteries set against the haunting landscapes of the western Great Lakes & upper Midwest, where the lake has already decided what it will give back .

The Real Magic Is Survival: Reimagining Girlhood Through Myth

There is a kind of myth that begins not with a goddess or a monster, but with a girl—ordinary, fragile, luminous in her unknowing. She doesn’t lift a sword or command the seas. Her weapon is quieter: endurance. Her myth begins the moment she decides to live.

In my novels—Some Species of Outsider-ness, Whimsy and Bliss, Dreamcatcher, The Cartography of First Love, The Shadows We Carry, and Dancing Without Music—I return again and again to this quieter mythology of survival. These are stories where mental illness, trauma, and identity fracture are not narrative detours but sacred terrains. Where girls and boys on the edge of unraveling become the new myth-makers—reclaiming the right to define themselves, to choose love in the face of despair, to say: I am still here.

Photo by Ozgur Camurlu on Pexels.com

Girlhood as Mythic Terrain

For too long, the myths told about girls—especially those living with mental illness—have been either tragic or ornamental. They are Ophelia, drowned; Persephone, abducted; the muse, never the maker. But the modern myth I want to tell is not one of passivity. It’s about the interior odyssey: what it means to fight through panic and self-doubt, through disordered thoughts and despair, and to still reach toward connection.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, Piper and Slater—two teens navigating bullying, chronic illness, and a dark web of secrets—are outsiders not because they are weak, but because they see too much. Their sensitivity is not a flaw; it’s a kind of second sight. In a world obsessed with belonging, they learn that empathy can be both their wound and their weapon. Their survival is the magic.

Whimsy and Bliss reimagines the coming-of-age myth as a map of thin places—the unseen seams between childhood wonder and adult loss. Abigail Whimsy, ever the dreamer, and Lainey Bliss, her pragmatic counterpart, move through a lakeside summer like two halves of the same soul, searching for the portals where wonder still seeps through. It’s less about escaping reality than about expanding it—about realizing that the magic we’re looking for was always inside the friendship itself. Girlhood, here, is its own mythic realm: ordinary and holy, bruised and glittering.

Mental Illness as Modern Myth

To write about mental illness is to write about thresholds. Between the seen and unseen. Between the mind that betrays and the mind that longs to heal. In The Cartography of First Love, Zibby and Nico meet inside a psychiatric unit—a place both sterile and sacred. Their story isn’t about illness as spectacle, but about love as witness. Within those six weeks, they trace the coordinates of first love across therapy rooms, greenhouses, and whispered library exchanges.

There’s a map inside both of them, drawn in scars and tenderness. The miracle isn’t that they find each other—it’s that they find themselves. Years later, when they meet again by chance, the question isn’t whether love survives time, but whether healing does. The myth of recovery is rarely linear. It spirals, it falters, it returns. It asks us to keep choosing life, even when it hurts.

Mia and Milo, the central pair in Dancing Without Music, echo this theme in a rawer, more dangerous register. Two teens falling in love while their worlds are falling apart: Mia fighting an eating disorder, Milo hiding seizures and depression. Their story—threaded with bullying, trauma, addiction—pulls from the real language of survival. These aren’t heroes in shining armor. They’re kids clawing their way toward light through the rubble of social media cruelty, systemic failure, and internal chaos.

Their resilience is not romanticized. It’s messy, imperfect, human. Love doesn’t save them—but it steadies them long enough to seek help, to speak truth, to begin the slow choreography of recovery. The real dance, as the title suggests, happens in silence—in the small, defiant act of staying alive when everything tells you not to.

Dream as Ancestral Healing

If Dancing Without Music is rooted in realism, Dreamcatcher drifts through the luminous realm of allegory. Here, girlhood is not only psychological terrain but spiritual inheritance. Dash, a Dakota Sioux girl grieving her parents’ mysterious deaths, touches a dreamcatcher in her window and falls through clouds into Baumwelt—a world woven from collective memory and ancestral wisdom.

In Baumwelt, survival takes the form of mythic questing: dragons, shapeshifters, and lands that mirror trauma back as a test. But beneath its fantasy lies the same heartbeat as every other book I’ve written—the belief that facing one’s fears, honoring one’s lineage, and listening to the quiet voice within can heal what the world tries to silence. Dash learns that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the decision to keep walking through it.

In this way, Dreamcatcher becomes an Indigenous-inflected myth of reclamation: the sacred task of remembering who you are when the world forgets. The land itself participates in her recovery. It’s not an escape from pain—it’s a return to belonging.

The Inheritance of Shadows

The Shadows We Carry extends that mythic inheritance into adolescence and womanhood, where mental illness and memory intertwine. This novel asks: What do we carry that isn’t ours? Which stories, silences, and stigmas do we inherit from generations past?

The protagonist’s journey through grief and genetic mental illness becomes a reckoning with family ghosts—literal and figurative. The book suggests that recovery is never solitary. It’s ancestral, collective. Healing ripples backward as well as forward. When one girl chooses therapy, medication, art, or simply another sunrise, she’s rewriting the myth for everyone who came before her.

Survival as Sacred Art

Across these novels, I see a pattern—a constellation of wounded but luminous characters turning their pain into passage. Whether through art (Some Species of Outsider-ness), friendship (Whimsy and Bliss), heritage (Dreamcatcher), love (The Cartography of First Love), or sheer endurance (Dancing Without Music), they transform suffering into story. To survive, they create. To create, they must survive. The loop is sacred.

Photo by Mohammed Alim on Pexels.com

In this sense, writing these books has always felt like both ritual and rebellion. Each story emerged during my own seasons of anxiety, loss, or recovery. Each one asked me to reimagine girlhood not as something fragile but as something feral and enduring—a myth of resilience hidden inside every nervous system, every heartbeat, every moment we choose to stay.

When Mia and Milo hold each other after the worst night of their lives, it’s not a fairytale ending. It’s a beginning. When Zibby and Nico meet again after a decade apart, it’s not closure—it’s continuation. When Dash stands at the edge of the dreamworld, deciding whether to return, it’s not escape—it’s integration. Survival, after all, isn’t static. It’s art in motion.

Toward a New Mythology

What would it mean to tell girls—not just in books but in life—that their feelings are not too much, their minds not too broken, their stories not too dark? That inside every panic attack, every relapse, every sleepless night, there’s still a pulse of mythic power saying go on?

Photo by Frank Cone on Pexels.com

The old myths taught us that magic was external: fire, lightning, divine intervention. The new myths—those of mental health and recovery—teach us that magic is endurance, empathy, and the quiet work of staying.

In the end, the real magic is survival.
It’s the girl who keeps painting when her hands shake.
It’s the boy who takes his meds and still writes poems.
It’s the friendship that outlasts grief.
It’s the love that doesn’t cure you but holds you steady until you can begin to heal yourself. That, to me, is the truest myth—the one we’re all still writing.