Tag: phone anxiety

A Phone Anxiety Thriller Series Dictation in Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Voices Go to Hide

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

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

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

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

A Frequency of Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Recording Has a Ghost

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

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

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

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

Call Waiting

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

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

 

The Challenging Part of Writing These Books

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

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

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

I Have to Put the Terror Somewhere

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

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

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

Why I Keep Writing the Phone Anxiety Thrillers

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Mental Illness Beneath the Suspense

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

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

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

Trauma Doesn’t Always Stay in the Past

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

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

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

When the Brain Starts Searching for Threat

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

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

Memory Is Not a Recording

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

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

The Hospital Is Frightening Because People Had Power

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

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

What About Hearing Voices?

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

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

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

When Other People Define Your Reality

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

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

Why Recordings?

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

The Ghost May Be the Person You Used to Be

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

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

Every Recording Has a Ghost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Frequency of Secrets: A Phone Anxiety Thriller

Finishing A Frequency of Secrets Earlier Than Expected

I finished A Frequency of Secrets earlier than I expected. The words came quickly, but not because the story was easy to write. They came quickly because the subject lives so close to me mentally. The fears, the spiraling thoughts, the imagined conversations, and the constant anticipation of what might happen next were already familiar territory and kept me up nights.

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of someone with phone anxiety—the chaos, confusion, and constant what-ifs? For someone who suffers from phone anxiety, a ringing phone is rarely just a ringing phone. It can become a warning, a confrontation, a piece of bad news, or the beginning of a situation that hasn’t even happened. Elaborate thoughts arise before the call is answered. Connections are made between events that may have nothing to do with one another. A delayed response can feel like rejection. An unknown number can become a threat. A brief silence on the other end can open the door to dozens of worst-case scenarios.

Phone anxiety can also be intensely physical. It can bring panic, sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, tension, and the overwhelming urge to avoid the call altogether. Yet the mental symptoms can be just as consuming. The mind inflates ordinary circumstances into disasters. It rehearses every possible outcome, searches for hidden meanings, and prepares for problems that may never exist. A Frequency of Secrets was written by someone who understands that experience.

The novel reveals what can happen inside a phone-anxiety-stricken mind, where fear alters perception and creates connections that otherwise might not exist. In the story, voices, calls, secrets, and imagined possibilities begin to overlap. The telephone becomes more than an object. It becomes a source of dread, suspicion, memory, and uncertainty. It’s an emotional closeness so much so that I didn’t have to search very far for the feelings behind the story. The anxiety was already there. The physical sensations were familiar. The habit of turning a small uncertainty into a much larger possibility was familiar. Once I entered that mindset on the page, the words flowed freely and consistently.

A Frequency of Secrets is part of my new series, A Phone Anxiety Thriller. This series is especially close to me because its psychological foundation comes from an experience I know intimately. The connections to phone anxiety seem to run through my veins. Every unanswered call, imagined emergency, misunderstood silence, and intrusive possibility offers another pathway into suspense.

These novels are not simply about telephones. They’re about anticipation, what the mind creates while waiting for someone to answer, the stories we invent when we don’t have enough information, and how quickly those stories can begin to feel real. Below is the cover (from the Ukrainian graphic designers at GetCovers) of the next in the series, because having the cover prompts mental engagement and the need to get words onto paper.

Writing this series allows me to take something that has caused genuine discomfort in my own life and transform it into fiction. On the page, anxiety becomes atmosphere. Avoidance becomes tension. Racing thoughts become clues, suspicions, and dangerous possibilities.

Finishing A Frequency of Secrets quickly made sense. I was writing from a place that was already deeply known to me. I understood the fear before I understood the plot. I recognized the emotional rhythms before I wrote the scenes. Once locked into that world, I stayed awake nights trying to get the characters’ anticipation out of my system because of the emotional intensity. This series may be fictional, but the anxiety beneath it is real to me.