For the longest time, I really did try to write happier books. I don’t even know that I made a conscious decision that I was going to be a happy-story writer. I think I had just lived through so much already that when I sat down to write, some part of me wanted the page to be the place where things were easier. Maybe I thought if I could control the story, I could keep it from getting too heavy. I could give people better endings. I could write something that didn’t hurt.
The problem was that my stories apparently had absolutely no interest in cooperating with that plan.
I’d start writing something that seemed light enough, and then somewhere along the way it would get sad. Or uncomfortable. Or somebody would say something that changed the whole feeling of the scene, and suddenly I was following that instead. Sometimes I’d look up and realize the story had wandered into a completely different genre than the one I thought I was writing. It happened often enough that eventually I had to admit there was a pattern here, and the common denominator was me.
I had written and published books before I started writing horror, and I’m not ashamed of that. They were part of me learning how to write. But I struggled with those books in a way that I don’t struggle with darker fiction. I could never quite get them to feel the way I wanted. I’d keep working at the voice, changing things, trying to make the story settle into place, and there was always this feeling that I was pushing instead of following.
And I think that’s what took me so long to understand: being able to write something and feeling like it belongs to you are not the same thing.
I had spent years writing through trauma. Not writing about every specific thing that happened to me, because there are things I have never put in a book and things I may never put anywhere people can read them. But the feelings were there. Grief was there. Helplessness was there. The kind of fear where nothing has technically happened yet, but your body already knows something is wrong—that was there too. I could try to write around those things all I wanted, but somehow they kept finding their way onto the page.
Eventually, I stopped treating that as a failure.
I don’t remember some huge dramatic moment where I announced, “That’s it. I’m a horror writer now.” It was more like getting tired of arguing with myself. Fine. If every story wants to get weird, let it get weird. If the grief wants to stay, let it stay. If the safest person in the room suddenly feels wrong, maybe that’s the part I should be paying attention to instead of trying to drag the story back toward something nicer.
Once I started doing that, writing felt different.
Not magically easy. Let’s not get carried away. I still overthink things, rewrite things, stare at paragraphs wondering why the hell I thought they were good yesterday, and I usually have more than one manuscript trying to get my attention because apparently one is not enough. But the voice finally felt more like mine. I wasn’t forcing the story to smile when it didn’t want to.
Looking back, I think I wanted writing to be an escape from everything I’d survived. Instead, it became somewhere I could take those things apart without having to tell the exact story of what happened. I could take grief and turn it into a voice in a tunnel. I could take helplessness and hand it to a character. I could take the feeling of trusting the wrong person and build an entire nightmare around it.
The plot could be fictional while the thing underneath it—the thing making my chest tighten while I wrote it—was very real.
That’s probably the closest I can come to explaining how I ended up here. I kept trying to write happy stories, and they kept getting dark.
Eventually I stopped asking them to apologize for it.