Letters Never Sent: The Language of Almost-Love

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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.

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2. The Letters We Don’t Send

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.

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4. The Language of Almost

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.

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6. The Cartography of Closure

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.

Thresholds Between Worlds: Writing the Dreaming Mind

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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.

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4. Dream as Bridge, Not Escape

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.

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5. The Craft of Crossing

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.

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6. Waking Gently

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.

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7. The Threshold Itself

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.

The Quiet Work of Staying: Healing in Fragments

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Before I learned how to write, I learned how to stay. Not the cinematic kind of staying—the triumphant recovery arc, the sudden sunrise after years of darkness—but the quiet, ordinary kind. The kind that happens in fragments: brushing your teeth after days of forgetting due to deep depression, answering one text message, writing a single word. The kind of staying that doesn’t look heroic, but is.

For a long time, I thought healing would feel like a song. Now I know it’s more like static—broken, uneven, but still carrying sound.

Both The Alphabet of Almosts and Some Species of Outsider-ness were born from that static—from the ache of trying to make coherence out of chaos, from the question that threads through all mental-health narratives: how do you keep living when the story doesn’t make sense anymore?

1. Fragments as Language

When I began writing The Alphabet of Almosts, I didn’t set out to create a story about illness. I set out to alphabetize survival—to give shape to the words that hovered between diagnosis and hope.

The book unfolds through small vignettes, each one a lettered fragment—A for Admission, B for Breakthrough, C for Control—and together they build something resembling a life. I was living in that in-between place: between recovery and relapse, clarity and confusion. Each fragment became a way of saying, I’m still here, even if I can’t say it all at once.

There’s something deeply honest about fragments. They don’t pretend to be whole. They allow contradiction, misstep, mess. They remind us that language, like healing, doesn’t have to be linear to be true.

For me, fragmentary writing became both mirror and medicine. When the mind fractures, linearity can feel dishonest. The world arrives in flashes—images, memories, unfinished thoughts. Writing in fragments wasn’t an aesthetic choice; it was survival. It was how I could stay.

2. The Work of Staying

Staying is not glamorous. It doesn’t get book deals or film adaptations. It doesn’t even feel like progress most days. Staying is brushing your hair. It’s making a list you may never finish. It’s finding small reasons not to disappear.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, I wanted to explore that kind of endurance through two characters—Piper and Slater—whose internal battles are as invisible as they are immense. Piper lives with bipolar disorder, Slater with the lingering paralysis of Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Both are marked by difference in a world that worships sameness.

Their story begins not with love, but with survival: two teens learning that belonging doesn’t mean being fixed, but being seen. The novel’s title comes from the idea that being an outsider is not a condition to be cured—it’s a species to be studied, honored, understood.

The quiet work of staying runs through both their lives. For Piper, it’s managing the cycle of mania and depression without letting either define her. For Slater, it’s learning to move again—physically, emotionally, relationally—after trauma. Neither of them is “better” by the end. But they are still here. And sometimes that’s enough.

Staying is not stagnation; it’s an act of devotion. It’s choosing to keep breathing even when the air feels heavy. It’s sitting in your own skin, even when it doesn’t feel like home.

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3. Healing in Fragments

The culture of wellness often sells us a singular image of healing: bright mornings, clear journaling pages, the triumphant “after.” But true healing—especially after mental illness, grief, or trauma—is far less symmetrical.

Healing happens in fragments. In partial sentences. In moments you forget to count as progress: the laugh you didn’t expect, the walk you took without dread, the meal you actually tasted.

In The Alphabet of Almosts, the narrator describes healing as “collecting the scattered glass of myself and learning not to bleed every time I touch it.” I think of that often. Healing is not about gluing the shards back together into what once was; it’s about learning to live among them, to see beauty even in the breakage.

The Japanese art of kintsugi—mending broken pottery with gold—has become almost cliché in self-help spaces, but there’s a reason it endures. It acknowledges fracture as part of the story. The break becomes the illumination.

That’s what I wanted for Some Species of Outsider-ness too: a kind of emotional kintsugi, where characters mend not by erasing their scars but by tracing them in gold.

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4. The Myth of Wholeness

Wholeness is overrated. I don’t mean that cynically. I mean that wholeness, as it’s often sold to us, is a myth that keeps us ashamed of our incompleteness. It suggests there’s an endpoint to becoming human. But what if our task isn’t to be whole, but to be honest?

Fragments allow for honesty. They let contradiction breathe. You can be healing and hurting, hopeful and hopeless, all at once. You can love your life and still want to leave it some days. You can laugh and cry within the same minute, and both are true.

When readers tell me they saw themselves in The Alphabet of Almosts, it’s rarely because they relate to every word. It’s because they recognized a single line that felt like their own breath. That’s the gift of fragmentation—it leaves room for others to enter.

And maybe that’s what healing really is: not the restoration of self, but the reconnection to others. To community. To language. To the small rituals that keep us tethered to the living.

5. What the Outsiders Teach Us

The title Some Species of Outsider-ness came to me during a sleepless night. I was thinking about how often we label difference as deficiency. How quick the world is to exile those whose rhythms don’t match its pace.

But outsiders—those who live at the edge of ordinary—often see what others cannot. They notice the fissures, the unspoken rules, the small violences of normalcy. They remind us that empathy is not a theory but a practice.

Piper and Slater’s story is, in a sense, a love letter to outsiders: to those who feel too much, too loud, too strange. It’s also a call to stay—to resist disappearance. Their survival is not cinematic. It’s quiet. But quiet doesn’t mean small.

The quiet work of staying is the foundation of every great act of love. Because staying—whether in a body, a relationship, or the world itself—requires belief in something beyond the immediate pain. It’s faith in tomorrow’s breath.

6. The Shape of Hope

Both books taught me that hope doesn’t always look like light. Sometimes it looks like a shadow. Sometimes it’s the pause between two heartbeats, the whisper between words. Hope, for me, is found in the act of making: writing, painting, collaging. In taking fragments and saying, You still matter. In creating beauty that refuses to be perfect.

When I wrote The Alphabet of Almosts, I kept a note above my desk that said, Stay in the room. That was my whole goal—not to write a masterpiece, not to heal overnight, but simply to stay. To stay long enough to turn a feeling into a line, a line into a page, a page into something that could keep another person company in their own darkness.

Art doesn’t fix us. It doesn’t erase pain. But it translates it. It gives it a place to rest. It lets others know they’re not alone in the fragments.

7. The Quiet Ending

When people ask me what The Alphabet of Almosts is “about,” I tell them it’s about learning to live inside unfinished sentences. When they ask about Some Species of Outsider-ness, I say it’s about the kind of courage that doesn’t get applause—the courage to stay.

Healing will never be tidy. It will never be final. But maybe that’s its beauty. Maybe the work of being alive is to keep stitching the fragments together, one breath at a time. There’s a line near the end of The Alphabet of Almosts that still feels like a compass to me:

“Maybe we don’t need to be whole. Maybe we just need to stay long enough to see what else becomes possible.”

Fantasy has its dragons. Romance has its declarations. But healing—real, quiet, ordinary healing—has this: the act of staying. So if you find yourself in pieces, remember this: every fragment is proof that you have not disappeared. You are still here. You are still writing. And that, too, is a kind of wholeness.

Portals Made of Language: Why Fantasy Still Matters

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Before I ever believed in magic, I believed in words. Not the easy kind—abracadabra, or once upon a time—but the harder ones that carried grief and wonder in equal measure. The kind of words that didn’t promise escape, but understanding. Fantasy, for me, has never been about running away from reality; it has always been about walking toward it through a different door.

That door is language itself. Every metaphor is a threshold, every poem a small, shimmering key. And if you listen closely enough—between syllables, between breaths—you’ll hear the hinge creak open.

1. The Work of Wonder

When I began writing Dreamcatcher, I wasn’t trying to build another world. I was trying to make sense of the one I already lived in—the one that didn’t always make space for silence, for Indigenous belief, for the shimmer between dream and waking. Baumwelt, the world my protagonist Dash steps into through her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, grew from the ache of that absence.

In the beginning, I thought Baumwelt was a fantasy realm. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized: it was a reflection. Every root in that world grew from real soil—the Dakota stories, the wind through Minnesota pines, the ache of losing and finding yourself again.

Fantasy has a way of returning us to what’s most real. It asks us to look at our world through the mirror of the impossible, and in doing so, to see what we’ve overlooked. When Dash touches the dreamcatcher and slips between worlds, she isn’t escaping. She’s being invited to look deeper—to face the dark, to understand grief as something that can be walked through, not avoided.

Fantasy matters because it teaches us the work of wonder: that curiosity is not naiveté, and awe is not ignorance. It is an act of radical attention.

2. Language as Portal

In Ink & Ivy, language becomes a literal form of creation. Marisol, a young lady who runs a magical bookshop, discovers that what she writes can change the world around her. Her stories don’t just describe—they summon. But with every word comes responsibility; every metaphor has consequences.

This, too, is the work of writers: to understand that words are not harmless. They shape what we see. They summon possibility—or erase it.

In Ink & Ivy, the girls’ language becomes a living thing, something that resists control. The “pale man,” a figure who feeds on imitation and distortion, thrives on empty words—stories written without care, without truth. The girls learn that creation, to be sacred, must be done with reverence.

Fantasy, at its best, reminds us of the power of language. We speak worlds into being. We dream communities into possibility. We write our own maps through darkness. The portal isn’t the wardrobe or the dreamcatcher or the bookshop door. It’s the sentence itself—the turning of one word into another.

3. The Sacred Ordinary

Many people think fantasy is escapist because it contains dragons, spells, or portals. But what if those things are simply metaphors for what already lives within us? The dragon, in Dreamcatcher, isn’t just a beast—it’s fear, grief, the inheritance of pain. When Dash confronts it, she’s really confronting the trauma of generations, the unspoken stories that haunt her family.

And when Marisol in Ink & Ivy writes her way through grief, her pen becomes both wand and weapon—an instrument of creation that heals by revealing.

Fantasy is the literature of the sacred ordinary. It allows us to approach heavy truths with the gentleness of myth. It helps us say what cannot otherwise be said.

I think of Indigenous storytelling—how coyote and wind, willow and raven are not just symbols, but relatives. Fantasy, in its truest sense, carries that same heartbeat: it teaches us that the world is alive, responsive, and holy in its strangeness.

When readers step into Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, I don’t want them to find an escape hatch. I want them to find a mirror. I want them to feel what it means to hold grief and beauty in the same breath, to remember that imagination is not a luxury—it’s an inheritance.

4. Why We Still Need Fantasy

In an age of data and disconnection, we need stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. Fantasy does that. It re-enchants the world. The modern world is noisy with explanation. We want everything to be understood, categorized, proven. But what if the point of wonder is not to be solved, but to be stayed with? Fantasy slows us down. It asks us to listen. It gives us permission to imagine again—a radical act in a culture of cynicism.

When I visit workshops, I often tell young writers that fantasy is not an escape from truth; it’s a different route to it. The language of magic lets us speak about mental illness, loss, and love in ways realism sometimes can’t. A dragon can hold more honesty than a diary entry. A spell can say what a scream cannot.

In Dreamcatcher, the dream world exists because Dash’s waking life is too painful to face directly. In Ink & Ivy, the written world becomes a refuge from grief—but also a reminder that creation without integrity can destroy as easily as it heals. Both stories are, at their heart, about the power of imagination to rebuild us.

We still need fantasy because the world is still breaking—and fantasy shows us how to mend.

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5. The Door Within the Reader

Every time a reader opens a book, they cross a threshold. They leave behind their certainty and step into language. That act—quiet, solitary, miraculous—is the closest thing we have to magic. When I write, I try to make that doorway visible. Sometimes it’s a dreamcatcher. Sometimes it’s a bookshop in a forgotten town. But always, it’s a passage between the seen and the unseen, the possible and the impossible.

Fantasy matters because it reminds us that those borders are permeable. It whispers that the ordinary world is threaded with portals if only we know how to look. And maybe that’s the point—not to lose ourselves in the unreal, but to find our way back to the real with our eyes open wider, our hearts more attuned to wonder.

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6. Closing the Circle

In Dreamcatcher, Dash returns home after her journey through Baumwelt, carrying both loss and wisdom. In Ink & Ivy, Marisol learns that creation is not about control—it’s about connection. Both stories close with the same truth: that every world we build through language eventually leads us back to ourselves.

When I walk along the lake near my home in Minnesota, I often think about the way water mirrors sky—the way two worlds touch without truly merging. That thin line of reflection is where my stories live: the between-place where reality brushes against dream. Fantasy still matters because it keeps that shimmer alive.

In the end, every book is a portal. Every reader, a traveler. Every word, a small act of faith that the invisible still matters—that imagination, like water, can still cleanse, connect, and carry us home.

When Fiction Heals the Dreamer: Writing Trauma as Art

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There’s a quiet moment that comes after finishing a dark book—that first deep inhale, the feeling that the air has changed somehow. That’s what writing Long Since Buried felt like for me. I’d exhaled years of unspoken fear, and when the final chapter ended, the silence that followed wasn’t emptiness. It was relief.

But the story didn’t stop on the page. Healing never does.

What I learned in therapy—and later through mindfulness—is that creative survival isn’t about mastering pain; it’s about making room for it to transform. Long Since Buried gave the nightmare form. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful taught me how to live beyond it.

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The Two Languages of Survival

In therapy, I discovered that trauma speaks two dialects: chaos and control. Fiction became my translation of chaos—the wild, cinematic projection of buried emotion. Mindfulness became my translation of control—the patient return to breath, to the present, to what is still possible.

Writing Long Since Buried was visceral. It bled from dreamscapes and flashbacks, the body remembering danger. Every paragraph was an adrenaline pulse, an echo of that twelve-year-old’s terror.

Writing Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was slower—a reclamation of quiet. It was learning to listen to the world again, one heartbeat at a time. While the thriller roared, the memoir whispered. Both, however, were love letters to survival written in different tongues.

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The Mind–Body Bridge

Trauma divides us—the mind races ahead while the body stays trapped in old danger. Through therapy I learned how narrative and mindfulness work together to build a bridge back to wholeness.

Fiction let me remember safely. I could approach the pain through story, where characters held the fear for me. Mindfulness let me return safely. It anchored me to the now, reminding me that the threat was past.

I began to see that the very act of creating—forming sentences, describing light, naming sensation—was neurological repair. The brain’s storytelling instinct and the body’s breathing instinct are twin healers. Together they weave coherence from chaos.

When readers tell me Long Since Buried feels immersive, I know it’s because I wrote it with my entire nervous system. When they tell me Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful feels calming, it’s because I wrote it with the same system finally at rest.

Writing the Body Back Home

During therapy, my clinician once said, “The body keeps score, but it also keeps rhythm.” That sentence changed how I wrote. I started noticing rhythm everywhere—the pattern of my steps, the cadence of my sentences, the rise and fall of my breath.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I intentionally explored this rhythm. The prose mirrors the inhale–exhale cycle: tension, release; grief, gratitude. It’s structured mindfulness, disguised as narrative.

In Long Since Buried, rhythm became heartbeat and gunshot—the percussive language of suspense that mirrors trauma’s pacing: freeze, run, breathe. The thriller was the storm; the mindfulness memoir was the still water after.

Together, they compose a symphony of the same theme: how the body returns to itself after being lost in fear.

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Why the Dark Still Matters

People sometimes ask why I continue to explore the dark—murder, secrets, obsession—after publishing a book devoted to calm and healing. I think it’s because darkness isn’t the opposite of peace; it’s the doorway to it.

Writing thrillers like Long Since Buried allows me to enter that darkness on my own terms. The fear that once hunted me now waits on the page, obedient to craft. Through fiction, I can orchestrate the chaos that once consumed me. Through mindfulness, I can sit beside it without flinching.

The two practices are not opposites—they are partners. One dives deep into the abyss; the other teaches how to resurface without drowning.

The Craft of Compassion

When I teach or speak about writing through trauma, I remind others that craft and compassion are inseparable. Good storytelling isn’t about dramatizing suffering; it’s about humanizing it. The line between a scene of violence and a scene of healing is empathy—for the characters, for the reader, for yourself.

While revising Long Since Buried, I played with quiet moments amid tension—the smell of coffee in a sheriff’s office, the tremor of a hand brushing against a windowpane—small reminders that even in fear, life insists on beauty.

In Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, compassion showed up differently: as permission to rest, to not perform recovery as productivity. I wrote those pages with gentleness, the way you might speak to a frightened animal—softly, patiently, without sudden movement.

Both books required the same heartbeat of grace: You survived. Now, what will you make from the pieces?

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Creativity as Continuum

Looking back, I can trace a clear lineage between the two works—between the hunted girl of Long Since Buried and the healing woman of Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful.

  • One wrote from the wound.
  • The other wrote from the scar.

Together they tell a larger truth: healing is not an endpoint but a continuum of creation. We write the pain to understand it, and we write the peace to remember it.

If Long Since Buried was the exorcism, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was the benediction.

A Note to the Dreamers

If you’ve ever woken from a nightmare that feels too real, or carried a story inside you that no one believes—this is for you. You are not alone in the dark. The act of writing, painting, singing, or simply breathing through it is a radical declaration: I am still here.

Fiction may not heal the wound, but it can build a bridge to the part of you that wants to. Mindfulness may not erase memory, but it teaches you to hold it gently, without letting it consume you. Every story we tell from a place of survival becomes a lighthouse for someone still lost at sea. That’s why we keep creating. Not because we’ve conquered the dark—but because we’ve learned to live with its light inside us.

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In Closing, A Reflection…

When I look at my bookshelf now, I see not just titles but testaments. Long Since Buried stands as the girl’s scream turned into structure. Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful stands as the woman’s whisper turned into prayer.

Between them runs a thread of ink, breath, and bravery—proof that stories born of pain can become the architecture of peace.

And perhaps that’s the most honest definition of healing I know:
Not erasing the nightmare,
But rewriting it until it learns how to dream.

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Writing the Nightmare: How Long Since Buried Became My Way Back to Light

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When I was twelve, I began dreaming of being hunted.

It wasn’t the kind of nightmare that dissolves with morning light. These dreams followed me—in hallways, in car rides, in the spaces between waking and sleep. In them, I was always running. Sometimes, I saw who chased me; in others, there were only the shadows gathering at the edges, the sound of breath too close behind.

Therapists would later call it trauma’s echo, the body remembering what the mind couldn’t articulate. But at the time, I just called it fear. It clung to my ribs for decades, shapeshifting—into insomnia, perfectionism, silence. When I finally began therapy as an adult, my sessions became less about remembering events and more about re-entering the emotional rooms I’d locked shut. Those rooms were crowded with ghosts, but also with stories waiting to be told.

That’s where Long Since Buried was born—not as a thriller at first, but as a reckoning.

The Fiction That Remembered Me

I didn’t sit down to write a murder mystery. I sat down to write about a feeling I couldn’t escape—the sense of being watched, pursued, never quite safe in my own skin.

In Long Since Buried, twelve-year-old Sydney dies during what should have been an ordinary spring day in South Dakota. Thirty years later, her newly discovered twin, Laci, returns to the same town to unravel what happened. Two women, two timelines—one silenced, one searching.

When I began, I didn’t realize how closely those sisters mirrored the split inside me. Sydney became the self that never got to speak, the child frozen in that recurring nightmare. Laci became the adult voice, trying to rewrite what the dream refused to release.

I remember writing late into the night, hands trembling, feeling the same chill I had as a child. The words felt like digging—not for a plot twist, but for buried truth. I didn’t outline the story. It unfolded the way memory does—fragmented, looping, unreliable. Each chapter was a séance, calling forth pieces of the past I’d long since buried under survival instinct.

When Therapy Meets the Page

Over the years, therapy taught me how to sit with the body’s reactions—the quickened pulse, the tightening throat—without letting them drown me. Writing taught me how to translate those sensations into language. Between the two, I found a strange kind of balance: psychology as scaffold, story as sanctuary.

The sessions and the drafts often overlapped. One week, I’d describe the recurring dream to my therapist—the smell of dirt and spent ammo with its sulfurous, metallic odor, the sound of footsteps, the desperate wish to turn and face what chased me. The next week, I’d find that same image emerging in the manuscript—but this time, under my control. I could decide what happened when I turned around.

That was yet another time I realized that fiction could be a survival tool—not a means of escape, but a way to return to the site of the wound with agency. In writing, I was both hunted and hunter, both lost girl and adult author mapping the terrain of her own memory.

In this way, Long Since Buried became an act of reclamation disguised as suspense.

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The Town as Mirror

The fictionalized setting—Watertown, South Dakota—is more than a backdrop. It’s a possible mirror of containment and repression. On the surface, it’s idyllic: lakeside weddings, small-town gossip, the scent of lilacs after rain. But underneath, everyone knows something they won’t say out loud. Everyone carries their own secret version of the truth.

That, too, came from life. The unspoken rules of small communities. The polite silences that can hide harm. The way a family can appear whole from the outside while cracking beneath the weight of what’s unsaid.

When I described the town, I was also describing the psychological landscape of trauma—beautiful, familiar, and haunted. The serenity of the lake juxtaposed against the violence beneath its reflection. The wedding festivities standing as fragile rituals of denial.

Readers often tell me the book feels cinematic—as if the town itself were breathing. I think that’s because every building, every echo, every whispered conversation was built from memory’s architecture.

The Child Who Was Hunted

During therapy, I realized that the nightmares of being hunted were never about literal pursuit. They were metaphors for the feeling of being unsafe in my own story. The faceless hunter was every force—societal, familial, internal—that told me to stay small, quiet, compliant.

When I wrote Sydney, I gave that hunted girl a name, a world, and eventually, a voice that transcended death. Her chapters are written from the past, but they hum with an afterlife’s awareness. Through her, I could finally face the forest—not as prey, but as witness.

The process wasn’t easy. Writing Long Since Buried often meant reliving the old panic. I’d have to step away, breathe, ground myself in the present—feeling my feet, naming five blue things in the room. But each time I returned to the keyboard, I felt a little stronger. The page became a threshold: on one side, fear; on the other, creation.

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The Adult Who Returns

Laci’s sections—the modern-day timeline—are my love letter to persistence. She’s not fearless; she’s relentless. Her investigation isn’t just about uncovering who killed her twin. It’s about confronting the emotional debris that lingers when truth has been buried too long.

Writing her reminded me that healing is never about erasing what happened; it’s about learning to carry it differently.

I gave Laci my own instincts—her tendency to overanalyze, her compulsion to observe, her need to understand why. I also gave her what I wish I’d had sooner: a sense of permission to look, even when others warned her not to.

Through her, I could finally answer the question the nightmare always posed: What happens if I stop running?

The Silence After the Gunshot

There’s a moment in the first draft—quiet, almost imperceptible—where time seems to stop. A gunshot echoes. The scene goes still. My first readers describe it as eerie, cinematic. For me, it was cathartic.

That silence after the shot became symbolic: the stillness that follows a trauma before the mind rushes to fill in the blanks. In that pause, the reader and I share the same breath—both of us listening for what comes next.

And what comes next, in fiction and in life, is always the same: choice. Do we remain buried in the narrative others wrote for us, or do we dig our way toward our own version of truth?

Writing as Resurrection

I used to think writing about pain would make it permanent. But I’ve learned it can do the opposite. When we give shape to what haunts us, we reclaim it. We define it before it defines us.

In that way, Long Since Buried became both elegy and resurrection. It honored the frightened twelve-year-old who couldn’t wake herself from the dream, while allowing the adult me to finish the story on her own terms.

The nightmares still visit sometimes, though less frequently now. When they do, I no longer wake in panic. I reach for a notebook. I listen. I write. Because I’ve learned that every dream, even the terrifying ones, contains a fragment of language waiting to be set free.

Why I Still Write the Dark

Readers often ask why I continue to write thrillers—why I linger in the dark when I’ve already survived it. The answer is simple: because the dark is where I found my voice.

The shadows aren’t just where fear lives; they’re also where empathy grows. In exploring human darkness—greed, guilt, survival, grief—I’ve learned to honor the complexity of being alive.

For me, Long Since Buried isn’t just a story of murder or revenge. It’s a story of reclamation—of what happens when a girl who once dreamed of being hunted becomes the woman who writes the ending.

That’s the true closure fiction gives us: not a perfect resolution, but a language for what once felt unspeakable.

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Sometimes the stories that terrify us are the ones that most need to be written.
Sometimes the only way out of a nightmare is through the page.

And when we finally reach the end—when the words fall quiet and the ghosts rest easy—we realize we were never being hunted by monsters.
We were being pursued by our own courage, waiting for us to stop running and turn toward it.

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.

The Art of Liminality: Writing the Spaces Between Worlds

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“Between waking and dream, girlhood and grief, there is a place that language almost reaches—and that’s where I write from.”

Some stories do not belong entirely to one world.
They hover in the threshold—that delicate, dangerous space between what we know and what we believe. The in-between has always been my country. It’s where I’ve found the most honest versions of myself, and where my characters seem to find me first—half-shadow, half-light, whispering: write the crossing.

To live in the liminal is to refuse the false choice between realism and magic, sanity and madness, childhood and adulthood. It is to see both—and to find the trembling beauty in the blur.

Whimsy and Bliss: Growing Up Inside Wonder

In Whimsy and Bliss, I wanted to write about that final summer before the horizon changes—the cusp between friendship and farewell, between the girls they were and the women they’re about to become.

Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss live inside this threshold. Their adventures—climbing water towers at midnight, mapping “thin places,” chasing the remnants of childhood magic—are less about fantasy and more about memory. Each act of wonder becomes an act of grief for the selves they’re outgrowing.

To write them was to remember the ache of adolescence: that strange ache of realizing that magic was never lost, only waiting for you to look differently.

Ink & Ivy: Creation as Refuge

When I began Ink & Ivy, I was thinking about art as survival—about how creation can become a sanctuary when the world fractures. The story’s young booksellers and illustrators discover that their drawings begin to breathe, that the ink itself can resist darkness.

But underneath the fantastical premise lies a human truth: we build worlds not to escape the real, but to understand it. Ink becomes rebellion. Story becomes shelter. For Marisol and her circle, creation is both resistance and refuge—the liminal act of turning despair into design, shadow into shape.

That’s what writing feels like for me, too—a quiet act of defiance against silence.

Shadows We Carry: The Weight of Inheritance

Then came Shadows We Carry, a book born from the tension between remembering and release. It lives in the psychological dusk—between grief and growth, silence and confession. Its characters inherit what isn’t visible: generational trauma, unspoken histories, ghosts of choices that still breathe through bloodlines.

Writing it taught me that the liminal isn’t always mystical; sometimes it’s painfully human. The space between who we were raised to be and who we are becoming can feel like a haunting—and yet, it’s also where healing begins. The shadows we carry are not just burdens; they are thresholds. Step through them, and you find yourself rewritten.

Déjà vu: The Echo Between Memory and Madness

In Déjà vu, the line between dream and waking frays entirely. Ivy Lancaster’s visions, her looping déjà vu, and her haunting sense of repetition are not supernatural tricks—they’re metaphors for what trauma does to time.

To live with memory is to live in a loop: to relive, re-see, re-feel what logic insists is over. Writing this book meant surrendering to that repetition—finding beauty in the recursion, empathy in the confusion.

The story asks: what if madness isn’t madness at all, but a language the world has forgotten how to read?

Why We Need the In-Between

Liminality terrifies because it resists certainty. It’s a door that never entirely shuts, a sky that never chooses day or night. But within that uncertainty is grace. It’s where imagination lives, where empathy begins.

The young and the haunted, the dreamers and the doubters—they all live here, straddling worlds, speaking in metaphors because plain speech fails. To write the liminal is to honor the unseen bridges: between sanity and sensitivity, between what was and what will be.

When I write, I try not to choose a side. I let both worlds breathe.

For the Reader Between Worlds

If you’ve ever felt too much, or too early, or too in-between—this space is for you. Hold the blur. Let your contradictions coexist. The liminal is not indecision; it’s artistry.

And maybe, somewhere between dusk and dawn, story and silence, you’ll find yourself not trapped between worlds—but finally belonging to both.“To write the crossing is to remember: thresholds are not barriers, but invitations.”

Novelist of YA Psychological Mysteries, YA Fantasy Books & Dark Noir Suspense Thrillers

Stories that survive the dark... Where girls fight back and nightmares have teeth.

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