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.