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 .
A Midwestern atmospheric literary fiction collection rooted in place, season, and complicated lives
Some towns don’t change. They just learn how to hide it better.
In the northern Midwest, ordinary lives bend quietly, until they don’t.
In the quiet towns and backroads of the northern Midwest, nothing stays buried forever.
Set against apple orchards, corn mazes, gravel roads, and wind-cut fields, North of Ordinary is a literary short story collection that traces the
Blending contemporary literary fiction with the textures of rural America, this collection captures the quiet drama of people caught between obligation and desire, memory and reinvention. Each story is grounded in Midwestern landscapes—where the air carries cider, dust, and something unsaid—and where even the smallest decision can echo.
Perfect for readers who love:
character-driven fiction and emotionally resonant storytelling
small town drama and layered relationships
atmospheric literary fiction with a strong sense of place
coming-of-age themes, family tension, and quiet unravelings
the work of Elizabeth Strout, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver
North of Ordinary is a collection about what lingers— in towns that remember, in families that fracture and hold, and in the long, quiet moment before a life changes course.
Welcome. I’m Angela Ellen Grey — author, artist, and a believer in the kind of stories that make you feel your pulse.
I write for the girls who stayed awake. For the ones who walked home alone. For the dreamers who step through the wrong doorway and discover they’re stronger than anyone expected.
Every story is a doorway. Some we hesitate to open. Some we run through screaming. Some are carved inside us — until we become the threshold.
🔪 The Dakota Killer Thrillers
Everything she survived made her dangerous. The kind of girl who lives through one killer doesn’t run from the next.
Meet Laci O’Neil — survivor, sister, reluctant fighter. She doesn’t go looking for trouble…, but in the Dakotas, trouble finds girls like her. Each book uncovers a new predator hiding behind the quiet of small towns and wide-open land. Different killers. Same silence. Laci refuses to look away.
If you love:
Missing girls who get found because someone refuses to stop searching
Rural noir with teeth
Survivors who aren’t done fighting
This is your next obsession.
📚 Start with:Long Since Buried ➡️ Continue the hunt in Since You’ve Been Gone 🩸 Forthcoming: Ghosted Buried Gone + Long Since Drowned
🌙 The Dreamcatcher Dark Fantasy Series
What if your nightmares were looking back?
Dash never meant to touch the dreamcatcher her grandmother made — but once she falls into Baumwelt, a dark, enchanted world stitched from fear and forgotten tales, nothing will ever be safe again. Not in the dreams. Not in the waking.
Because some dreams protect you. Others hunt you.
If you crave:
Creepy forests and whispered warnings
Indigenous-inspired magic realism
Fairytales with bite
Let me show you the stairway through the clouds.
📚 Begin with:Dreamcatcher: A Hidden World Fairy Tale Fantasy
✨ Why I Write These Stories
My worlds are shaped by the land — the plains, the rivers, the woods that hold secrets older than we are, by the whispers of the ancestors. By the too-real fears we try to outgrow, by the ordinary girls who choose to fight back anyway.
Whether the monster is a man or a shadow made of teeth — My characters rise.
Because survival isn’t just making it out alive. It’s refusing to stay silent afterward.
🔗 Join the Journey
Be the first to know when the next body is found — or the next portal opens.
📬Join my newsletter for exclusive bonus stories, case files, and dream-lore. 🎤 Book clubs and libraries — I’d love to visit.
Thanks for stepping into the dark with me. Let’s leave the lights off a little longer. 🌑✨
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There are some stories that never make it into envelopes. They live instead in the folds of memory—creased, re-read, and worn thin by time. They’re the letters we write but never send, the words that hover just behind the heart, waiting for a quiet room to finally be heard.
When I think about my first love, I think about the hum of hospital machines, the antiseptic air that tried and failed to scrub out tenderness, and the boy named Timothy who sat across from me in a hospital dayroom in Bismarck, North Dakota, when I was fifteen years old. We met in a place where silence was its own kind of language. There were no dances, no declarations, only the small exchanges that happen when two people recognize in each other a kind of ache they can’t yet name.
Timothy had eyes the color of bright blue mornings. I remember that more than I remember his laugh. I remember the way we traded drawings on napkins, folded them like notes. I remember the way time slowed when we spoke, how the air seemed to listen. It wasn’t the kind of love that blooms; it was the kind that lingers—half-formed, half-forbidden, the kind that teaches you that connection doesn’t always need duration to matter. That’s what I’ve come to call almost-love: the love that teaches you what the real thing feels like, even if it never lasts.
1. Cartography of the Heart
When I wrote The Cartography of First Love, I didn’t know I was writing about Timothy until the story was finished. I thought I was writing about two fictional teens—Zibby and Nico—who meet in an adolescent psych unit and build a map of first love through sketches, letters, and whispered promises. But every line of that book carries a trace of that hospital dayroom in Bismarck—the smell of coffee, the soft buzz of fluorescent light, the way we used humor like a flashlight against fear. The way we bonded with each other and the other teens on the ward. The dreams we had of escaping our broken lives, along with another teen couple, to a dream life in California.
Zibby’s eating disorder, Nico’s depression—those were fictions, but the emotional terrain was real. Both of them were trying to survive themselves, and somehow, in doing so, they found each other. That’s what Timothy and I were doing too: surviving. Learning how to be human in a place built to monitor it.
There’s something profoundly sacred about the love that forms between the broken. It doesn’t need polish or promise; it exists simply because both hearts recognize that the other is still beating. When Zibby says, “I don’t know if this is forever, but it feels like oxygen,” I was really writing what I never said to Timothy. I never told him how, in that sterile, rule-bound space, he made the world feel possible again. That his presence was proof that tenderness can exist even in places designed to contain it.
I’ve always believed that letters are a kind of spell—language meant not just to reach someone else, but to reveal the self. When I was fifteen, I started writing letters I never mailed. To therapists. To friends. To Timothy. They weren’t love letters in the romantic sense; they were survival letters. I wrote them to remember what feeling felt like. To tether myself to something human.
Years later, when I began The Cartography of First Love, I found those letters again—folded, smudged, and still breathing. I didn’t copy them verbatim, but their spirit is in every page. Letters, after all, are time machines. They preserve the version of us that dared to speak, even when no one was listening.
Maybe that’s what almost-love does—it leaves us with letters, not outcomes. It gives us language we can’t unlearn.
3. Whimsy’s Map of Wonder
In Whimsy and Bliss, I returned to the idea of unsent letters, though in a different form. Abigail Whimsy, the dreamer, writes postcards she never mails—notes to her best friend Lainey Bliss, to her late grandmother, to the lake itself. She believes that words can travel through time if you believe hard enough. Whimsy’s letters aren’t addressed to a boy; they’re addressed to memory, to childhood, to the version of herself that still believes in magic. But they, too, are love letters of a kind. Letters to what’s been lost.
The older I get, the more I understand that love doesn’t always need a recipient. Sometimes it’s enough to write it down, to set it loose like a paper boat and trust the current to carry it where it needs to go.
Timothy never saw my letters, but I think, in some cosmic way, he received them. Maybe they reached him through dream or distance or the invisible threads that connect first loves across decades.
Almost-love has its own dialect. It speaks in half-sentences, in glances, in small pauses before parting. It’s the love that never makes it to the altar but still shapes your sense of faith. It’s the song that stops mid-melody but leaves the tune in your head for years.
When I write about first love, I’m not writing about romance so much as recognition—the sacred shock of being seen. Zibby and Nico’s map in The Cartography of First Love isn’t geographic; it’s emotional. It charts the spaces between fear and desire, between what’s spoken and what’s withheld. It’s the same map I’ve been unconsciously drawing since fifteen—the topography of tenderness interrupted. In that way, Timothy is the first coordinate on all my maps. Every love that came after carries his imprint, faint but indelible.
5. What We Keep
I never saw Timothy again after that spring in Bismarck. We left the hospital on different days, back to different towns, different futures. I remember watching a late-spring snow swallow the parking lot as I waited for my mother’s car. I thought of how, in the snow, everything looks erased but is only hidden.
That’s how almost-love survives—not by continuation, but by concealment. It hides inside the art we make, the stories we tell, the way we hold someone’s name gently in the mind decades later.
When I look back now, I don’t feel regret. I feel gratitude. For the way that brief connection taught me how to pay attention. How to see the soul beneath the symptom. How to believe that love, in any form, is never wasted.
Every writer has an origin story. Mine began in that hospital, where letters I couldn’t send became stories I eventually did.
The Cartography of First Love was, in many ways, my way of finally mailing them. Each page was an envelope addressed to the past. Each chapter a way of saying: I remember. I made it. I’m still here.
In Whimsy and Bliss, that same message echoes through Abigail’s summer adventure—her yearning to finish her grandmother’s “map of thin places,” where wonder seeps through the world. It’s the same impulse: to locate the sacred in the ordinary, to find beauty even in what’s unfinished.
Because that’s what almost-love is—it’s unfinished beauty. It’s a comma instead of a period. And yet, sometimes, the sentence feels complete anyway.
7. To Timothy, Across Time
If I could write one more letter now, it would be simple:
Dear Timothy,
We were just kids. But for a moment, the world stood still. You showed me that connection doesn’t need perfection—it only needs presence. I don’t know where you are now, but a part of me still sends light your way whenever I write a story about first love. Thank you for being the first mapmaker of my heart.
Maybe he’ll never read it. Maybe he’s long forgotten that spring. But the point isn’t whether the letter arrives—it’s that it was written. Because writing, like loving, is an act of faith. We send the words out anyway.
When readers tell me The Cartography of First Love or Whimsy and Bliss reminded them of someone they once loved and lost, I smile. That’s the quiet miracle of almost-love—it continues. Not in the way we expect, but in the way stories and letters do: across time, across silence, between worlds.
The language of almost-love is the language of becoming. It teaches us that some doors never close; they simply turn into windows through which light still enters. And if you listen closely enough—under the hum of memory, under the rhythm of your own pulse—you can still hear it:
The letter, written in the dreaming heart, whispering—I was here. You were too. That was enough.
There are nights when the mind becomes a borderland—not waking, not sleeping, but something tender and trembling between. That’s where my stories live. When I write, I’m less interested in plot than in passage—the subtle moment when reality begins to shimmer and something unseen breathes through. It’s the hum before a dream takes shape, the hush in a library where imagination crosses the threshold.
My novels Dreamcatcher, Ink & Ivy, and Whimsy and Bliss were each born from that in-between space: where dream logic and daylight ache overlap, where imagination is both refuge and revelation. I’ve come to think of them not as separate stories, but as three rooms in the same house—the House of the Dreaming Mind.
1. The Doorway in the Dark
The idea for Dreamcatcher began with an image: a girl climbing through a fire-escape window, brushing against her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, and falling into another world. For Dash, my protagonist, the dream realm of Baumwelt is not a fantasy world in the traditional sense—it’s a reflection of her inner life. Every creature she meets, every landscape she crosses, echoes her memories, fears, and ancestral lineage. The world outside her window dissolves, but what replaces it is not pure invention—it’s memory rearranged by sleep.
Dreams are the language of the unconscious, but they are also archives of ancestry. In Dakota tradition, dreams carry instruction; they are bridges to spirit, not mere illusion. Writing Dreamcatcher, I wanted to honor that worldview—to let dream be teacher, not escape.
The dreaming mind, after all, has its own geography. It’s where past and present fold into each other, where the living and the dead keep company. Dash’s journey through Baumwelt is really a journey into inheritance—into how memory, myth, and trauma shape the self. When she wakes, nothing around her has changed, but she has. That’s what every good story does—it sends you somewhere so that you can return with new eyes.
2. Ink as Spellwork
If Dreamcatcher is the dream entered through sleep, Ink & Ivy is the dream entered through creation. Marisol, the girl who runs a hidden bookshop, learns that the stories she writes can alter reality. What she pens becomes what she lives; language itself becomes a portal. But her gift carries risk: every act of creation has a cost. Words can heal, but they can also harm.
In that sense, Ink & Ivy is about authorship as alchemy—the idea that writing is both spell and surrender. As writers, we are always crossing thresholds between imagined and real. We live half in the world and half in language. The line between the two blurs until even we can’t tell which is which. When Marisol writes, she’s not escaping grief; she’s giving it shape. The ink becomes her ritual of remembrance.
Writing, too, is a dream you enter deliberately. When I’m deep in it, time dissolves, sound thickens, and the body becomes peripheral. That liminal state—the creative trance—is the same consciousness that dreams speak from. It’s what poets call flow and mystics call vision. I’ve come to believe that all art is a form of lucid dreaming: we are awake, but we allow the dream to guide our hand.
3. Between Wonder and Loss
Then there is Whimsy and Bliss—a story set not in another world, but in the precise moment before girlhood fades into adulthood. Abigail Whimsy is the dreamer; Lainey Bliss is the realist. Together, they chase “thin places,” secret corners of their lakeside town where the fabric between worlds wears thin. Their summer map becomes a pilgrimage of goodbye—to childhood, to friendship, to the certainty that magic is only for the young.
In Whimsy and Bliss, the dreaming mind is not only nocturnal—it’s emotional. The dream here is nostalgia: the ache for what can’t be returned to, the shimmering almost-memory of who we were. When Whimsy and Bliss explore abandoned libraries and climb water towers under moonlight, they’re searching for wonder before it vanishes. They are practicing a kind of everyday mysticism—the belief that the ordinary world is already enchanted, if only we pay attention.
This, to me, is the heart of the dreaming mind: it notices what others overlook. It lives in metaphor, in symbol, in atmosphere. It insists that even grief has its own radiance.
People sometimes ask why I write “fantasy.” I never quite know how to answer, because my worlds are not so much invented as revealed. Fantasy, for me, is not an exit door—it’s an entrance. Dreaming and writing share a purpose: they make the invisible visible. They bridge what logic can’t. When I write about portals, I don’t mean only magical doors. I mean threshold moments: the second before grief hits, the silence after someone says I love you, the pause between inhale and exhale. These are the real portals, the moments where transformation begins.
The dreaming mind knows this. It’s always translating feeling into image: a locked door becomes fear; a rising tide becomes memory; a missing key becomes forgiveness waiting to happen.
In Dreamcatcher, Baumwelt is Dash’s subconscious given form. In Ink & Ivy, imagination becomes tangible, able to wound or heal. In Whimsy and Bliss, dream takes the shape of longing. Each story moves through a different register of the same truth: that what we imagine is not separate from who we are.
Fantasy still matters because it reminds us that the world is layered. Beneath the surface of the ordinary lies a pulse of mystery, waiting to be remembered.
Writing the dreaming mind requires a particular discipline of attention. It’s not about inventing strange worlds, but about listening for what already hums beneath language.
I’ve learned to approach each story like a lucid dreamer: half-awake, observant, unafraid. When a sentence feels too rational, I let it unravel. When logic tries to take over, I ask what image might speak instead.
A novel like Dreamcatcher grows through atmosphere before plot; it must be dreamed onto the page. Ink & Ivy demands reverence for language itself—every word carries spell-weight. Whimsy and Bliss thrives on emotional resonance—the threshold between childhood and adulthood is its own kind of magic realism.
To write the dreaming mind, one must accept unknowing. The story reveals itself only as you move through it, like a dream that solidifies upon waking. You can’t outline it entirely; you can only walk with it.
What I love most about dream-based writing is how it teaches you to wake differently. When you step out of a story like Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, you don’t just return to life—you return to it changed. Readers often tell me they see their own dreams differently after finishing these books. That is the greatest compliment I could receive. It means the stories have done their work: not to distract, but to awaken.
The dreaming mind is not a place we visit only at night. It’s a consciousness we carry—a sensitivity to meaning, pattern, and possibility. It’s the part of us that still believes rivers can whisper, that trees remember, that words are alive.
Writing through that lens keeps me tethered to awe. And awe, I think, is a form of prayer.
I return often to that fire-escape window from Dreamcatcher. The girl climbing through it. The touch of feathers, the shift of air. The dreamcatcher trembling like a heartbeat.
That moment—between step and fall, between real and imagined—is the space I write from. It’s the threshold itself that matters, not what lies on either side.
Because the dreaming mind isn’t about choosing one world over another. It’s about learning to live in both at once. To walk through daylight with a trace of starlight still on your skin. To carry the dream with you, awake.
Every story I’ve written is, in its own way, a map back to that place.
Dreamcatcher taught me to honor ancestral dream as truth. Ink & Ivy taught me that language is alive. Whimsy and Bliss taught me that growing up doesn’t mean losing wonder.
All three remind me that imagination is not an indulgence—it’s a responsibility.
The dreaming mind keeps us human. It holds the world together, one dream, one story, one word at a time.
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