Tag: writing

  • The Heroine’s Journey: A Powerful Alternative to the Traditional Hero’s Arc

    From ancient epics like Beowulf to modern myths featuring Link or Luke Skywalker, heroes have long dominated storytelling. You might be familiar with the Hero’s Journey—the classic narrative where a lone hero battles monsters, claims a prize, and returns transformed. But what about stories where victory isn’t about conquest, but about connection, healing, and integration?…

  • Faust in the French Quarter

    The semester has gotten off to a rousing but exhausting start, so I’ve been a bit lax in updating. For that, I do apologize. However, we are one month and two days away from the release of my new Louisiana gothic novel, The Casquette Rose. And the more I look back at the manuscript, the…

  • Gothic Romance x Genre Romance: Two Takes on the Same Pairing

    So, as I’m working on my current manuscript, a Louisiana Gothic novel tentatively titled The Casquette Rose, it’s come to my attention that I’ve done something similar before… in Carmilla’s Ghost, my second novel in The Adventures of Sam Hain. And what is it that I’ve done? Write Louisiana Gothic in both? No. What I’ve…

  • Soundtracking a Novel

    A lot of authors, especially indie authors, post mood boards and/or soundtracks for each of the novels. I don’t. My brain doesn’t work that way for some reason. Usually, a singular image is all I have in mind when I start working, and I don’t have the patience with myself to go searching for images…

  • When Writing Gets Personal

    This isn’t the type of post I ever thought I would make as a writer. When I was a child and even through the early stages of my writing career, I thought I would tell stories about other people, using the “write what you know” maxim as a way to share things I had researched…

  • Destiny’s Gambit: The Book that Almost Was

    Destiny’s Gambit: The Book that Almost Was

    So, today I want to muse about a book I almost wrote as the seventh installment in The Adventures of Sam Hain: Destiny’s Gambit. That’s right, the original plan for the book that became Carmilla’s Gambit was to focus on Destiny’s mental and emotional struggles with her past as she returns to the field to…

  • What Abandoning a Manuscript Taught Me About Writing

    So, in previous posts I talked about working on a cozy gothic fantasy for myself as a brain cleanser after the darkness and heaviness of Carmilla’s Gambit and Wolf in the Sanctuary. After drafting 21,819 words of this manuscript, I abandoned it. And I’m not sad, because the process of deciding to abandon this manuscript…

  • Unexpected Inspiration for Wolf in the Sanctuary

    Wolf in the Sanctuary, my Louisiana Gothic novel about a popular romance novelist seeking a career pivot into gothic fiction, features a lot of expected and unexpected inspiration. Given that there is a Rougarou, many would expect the old Cajun legends surrounding this werewolf-like creature to have been inspiration, and they were. The same goes…

  • Villainous Stakes and Motives

    With the release of Carmilla’s Gambit only a few days away, this post is going to contain a complete scene, an early scene, that should have no spoilers for anyone who has either read the book’s blurb or followed the series. That being said, this scene will demonstrate some of the stakes that are being…

  • Religious Trauma and Horror: Thoughts and Questions

    File Settings Done Title Description Thumbnail Will be cropped to a 3:2 aspect ratioUpload DraftPreviewContinue Style Button More Help your friends start a Substack Know someone who would be great on Substack? Insert your referral button to get credit for bringing them onboard and expand your network for recommendations, cross posts, and more.Not nowAdd referral…