Category: Writing & Research

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.

When the Brain Hears Danger: Auditory Processing, Trauma, and the Story Behind It

Sound is supposed to be simple. A phone rings, someone speaks, music plays in another room, or a door closes somewhere down the hall. We hear it, recognize it, and move on. But the act of hearing is far more complicated than sound entering our ears. The brain has to separate competing noises, recognize patterns, attach meaning to words, decide what deserves attention, and discard what doesn’t. When something interferes with that process, a perfectly ordinary sound can become confusing, exhausting, overwhelming, or quite possibly, even threatening.

That territory fascinated me while writing my newest novel, Call Waiting. In the novel, Londyn Andrews begins hearing voices when she’s placed on hold. Doctors attempt to explain what is happening to her as auditory processing trauma. In Londyn’s world, that explanation seems almost reasonable. Until the voices begin saying things they shouldn’t possibly know.

Before talking about the fiction, though, I wanted to explore the very real science underneath it. First, an Important Distinction: Auditory processing trauma isn’t an established medical diagnosis. I use the phrase fictionally in Call Waiting because it describes the intersection I wanted to explore: trauma, memory, attention, fear, and the way the brain interprets sound.

There are, however, several very real conditions and phenomena that overlap with this idea. One is Auditory Processing Disorder, often called APD or Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A person with APD may have normal hearing on a standard hearing test but still have difficulty making sense of auditory information. The problem is not necessarily whether the ears can detect the sound. It is what the nervous system does with that sound afterward.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association describes central auditory processing as involving the brain’s ability to discriminate sounds, determine where sounds originate, recognize auditory patterns, process timing information, and understand speech when competing or degraded sounds are present.

Trauma introduces another layer. Research involving post-traumatic stress has found differences in sensory and cognitive processing, including heightened responsiveness to threatening or unexpected stimuli, exaggerated startle responses, hypervigilance, difficulty filtering irrelevant information, and altered responses to auditory stimuli. In other words, sometimes the problem isn’t simply: Can I hear this? It can become: What does my brain think this sound means? That question became central to Call Waiting.

How Many People Are Affected? This is where numbers become complicated. Because diagnostic criteria for APD vary considerably, prevalence estimates vary too. Reviews have estimated APD at roughly 0.5–1% of the general population, while some estimates among children fall around 2–5%. Prevalence also appears to increase substantially among older adults, although estimates differ depending upon how auditory processing difficulties are defined and tested.

A 2026 review emphasized an important problem: there’s still considerable disagreement about diagnostic criteria, particularly in children, and APD symptoms can overlap with language disorders, attention difficulties, dyslexia, and other conditions. Adult prevalence is even harder to pin down. Research has produced widely varying estimates, and standardized information for adults younger than sixty remains limited.

There also isn’t a reliable prevalence figure for “trauma-related auditory processing problems” as one unified condition, because that isn’t a single diagnosis. Trauma may instead appear through PTSD symptoms, hypervigilance, sound sensitivity, tinnitus, hyperacusis, concentration problems, or difficulty filtering sensory information. That uncertainty interested me as a novelist. There are experiences people can describe very clearly even when medicine doesn’t have one convenient label that explains them all.

When Does It Begin? Auditory processing difficulties can have different origins. Some appear developmentally during childhood. Others may emerge or become more noticeable later in life. Acquired auditory-processing problems have been associated with neurological illness, aging, and traumatic brain injury.

ASHA notes that auditory problems following traumatic brain injury can include difficulty listening in background noise, maintaining attention, remembering spoken information, and following multistep verbal instructions. Importantly, those symptoms may arise from auditory-processing deficits, broader cognitive effects of brain injury, emotional conditions such as PTSD, or some combination of them.

Psychological trauma presents a different mechanism. Someone with PTSD may become unusually alert to environmental cues associated with danger. A sound that another person barely registers—a slammed door, footsteps, an alarm, a particular tone of voice—may trigger an intense physiological response because the nervous system has learned an association between that sound and threat. Research into PTSD has repeatedly documented exaggerated startle and hypervigilance, including heightened responses to unexpected noises. The ears may be functioning normally, but the brain is simply no longer treating the sound as neutral.

What Can It Feel Like? Auditory-processing difficulties don’t look identical from person to person, but commonly reported problems can include:

* difficulty understanding speech when several people are talking
* trouble following rapid speech
* needing people to repeat themselves
* difficulty following lengthy verbal directions
* struggling to understand conversation in restaurants or other noisy places
* confusing similar sounds or words
* feeling mentally exhausted from listening
* difficulty determining where a sound came from
* remembering only portions of something that was said

APD can exist even when standard hearing thresholds appear normal. Trauma-related auditory reactions can feel different. Hypervigilance may cause someone to continually scan the environment for sound. Unexpected noises may produce an exaggerated startle response. Certain sounds may become emotionally loaded because they are associated with previous experiences.

There are also separate sound-tolerance conditions such as hyperacusis, in which ordinary sounds can seem painfully or intolerably loud; misophonia, involving intense reactions to particular sounds; phonophobia, involving fear of sounds; and broader noise sensitivity. These terms describe different experiences and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.

Researchers have even documented persistent sound hypersensitivity following head trauma, accompanied in some patients by concentration problems, memory difficulties, anxiety, and increased sensitivity to stress. That combination—sound, memory, anxiety, interpretation—is precisely the space where fiction began taking over for me.

The Belief That “I’m Hearing Things”: One of the most interesting aspects of auditory perception is how rapidly the brain turns sound into meaning. We don’t experience speech as a collection of frequencies. We experience a person saying something. The brain fills gaps, predicts, filters, compares incoming information with memory, and decides which sound matters and which can disappear into the background. That can create a frightening disconnect when someone knows that they heard something but can’t understand why everyone else seems to have experienced the same environment differently.

It is important, however, not to equate auditory-processing problems with hallucinations. APD concerns difficulty processing actual auditory information. Hallucinations involve perceiving sound without a corresponding external auditory stimulus. Trauma responses, tinnitus, hearing disorders, neurological conditions, medication effects, sleep deprivation, and psychiatric conditions can produce very different auditory experiences, which is why unexplained symptoms deserve proper medical evaluation rather than self-diagnosis. But as a novelist, I became interested in the terrifying question between those categories: What happens when someone can no longer determine which explanation fits?

Can Trauma Change the Way We Listen? Research increasingly suggests that stress can influence auditory perception. A 2026 review examining acute and chronic stress described evidence that stress can influence auditory processing through multiple neural mechanisms, including interactions involving auditory networks and brain regions involved in emotion and threat detection. The authors emphasized that chronic stress may produce longer-lasting changes in auditory coding and perception.

Research on PTSD has likewise found abnormalities in attention to auditory information and in the brain’s response to both trauma-related and neutral sounds. This doesn’t mean trauma routinely causes people to hear nonexistent voices. It means something subtler and perhaps more fascinating. Trauma can change what the brain notices, ignores, labels as dangerous, and how strongly it reacts.

How Are Auditory Processing Problems Treated? There’s no single treatment because there’s no single presentation. For diagnosed APD, ASHA describes three broad management approaches that are frequently used together: modifying the listening environment, directly training specific auditory skills, and teaching compensatory strategies that help a person recover information they may have missed. That might mean reducing competing background noise, improving the quality of the auditory signal, using visual information along with spoken instructions, requesting repetition or clarification, strengthening memory and attention strategies, or undertaking individualized auditory training. Treatment should be tailored to the person’s specific deficits rather than assuming everyone with listening difficulties needs the same intervention.

When trauma or PTSD is contributing to sensory hyperarousal, treatment targets the trauma itself rather than treating the experience simply as an auditory disorder. The VA/DoD clinical guidelines identify Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and EMDR among the trauma-focused psychotherapies with the strongest research support for PTSD.

Someone experiencing new or unexplained changes in hearing, speech comprehension, sound tolerance, memory, or auditory perception should begin with a qualified healthcare professional. Depending on the symptoms, evaluation may involve an audiologist as well as neurological, psychological, speech-language, or other specialists.

And Then There Is Call Waiting. This is where I allowed reality to open the door for fiction. Londyn Andrews doesn’t hear the voices during ordinary conversation. She hears them when she’s on hold. That strange suspended place between dialing and speaking, connection and disconnection, and someone being there and no one answering.

At first, there are explanations: stress, trauma, and an auditory-processing problem. Something her brain is constructing from fragments of sound. Londyn wants to believe those explanations because they belong to a world she understands. Then the voices become specific. They belong to people in hospital rooms, accident scenes, motel bathrooms, near bridges and dark water, which are all instances where people may be suspended somewhere between life and death.

And eventually the impossible becomes personal. Londyn’s estranged mother, Georgia Bickford, enters hospice. While Londyn is waiting on another call, she hears a voice she knows immediately. Her own. Not the woman she is now. The girl she used to be. And that younger version of Londyn gives her a warning: Get the truth before your mother dies.

Suddenly, Call Waiting becomes about much more than mysterious voices. It’s about the things families refuse to say. The memories we reinterpret in order to survive them. The way childhood experiences can remain buried until some tiny sensory detail—a voice, a ring, a click, a few seconds of silence—brings everything rushing back. And the terrifying possibility that sometimes what we dismiss as noise contains the thing we’ve spent our entire lives trying not to hear.

The Brain Is Always Listening. The real science of auditory processing is fascinating precisely because hearing isn’t passive. Our brains constantly sort, prioritize, predict, interpret, and connect sound with memory. Trauma can complicate that process. Neurological conditions can complicate it. Attention can complicate it. Age, injury, stress, environment, and emotion can all influence the experience of listening.

The forthcoming fiction novel Call Waiting takes that reality and pushes it beyond the boundary of what science can explain. Because Londyn’s greatest problem isn’t that she hears voices. It is that eventually she has to decide whether they are symptoms or witnesses. And whether the one voice she has spent her whole life avoiding belongs to her mother, the dead, or herself.