I feel like there should be a better story here.
Something dramatic.
Maybe lightning. Maybe an old Stephen King book falling off a shelf. Maybe my granny turning away from one of the horror movies she always had playing and announcing that one day I, too, would emotionally disturb strangers for money.
That did not happen.
I basically became a horror writer because I could not stop making shit creepy.
Horror had always been around me. My granny loved horror movies, so I grew up with them playing in the background like that was a completely normal thing, which I guess it was in our house. I’ve always been a huge Stephen King fan, and I also love finding smaller horror and thriller writers who do something strange or unsettling that sticks with me.
But liking horror and realizing horror was where my own writing belonged were two completely different things.
For a while, I was just writing whatever I thought I was supposed to be writing. I had already written and published books, but getting them to sound like me was hard. I kept trying to fix the voice. I kept trying to make the stories feel natural. It always felt like I was pushing something uphill.
Meanwhile, everything I wrote kept getting darker whether I wanted it to or not.
Apparently my brain had already picked a genre and just forgot to tell me.
And honestly, that is still pretty much how my writing works. I’ll be doing something completely normal, have one random thought, say something like, “Wouldn’t that be fucking weird?” and then suddenly my brain refuses to let it go.
My husband and I were riding a four-wheeler around the ten acres behind our house recently when I randomly thought, “You know what would be fucking weird? What if we started digging and found bones?”
That was it.
That was the thought.
A normal person probably laughs, keeps riding, and goes on with their day.
Apparently I write a novella.
Because once an idea gets stuck in my head, it does not politely leave. It starts growing. I start wondering whose bones they are, why they’re there, what happens when someone finds them, what everybody thought they knew before that moment, and what the hell comes next.
Then I have to get it out.
Writing is how I do that.
Sometimes the beginning of a book comes from something painful. Sometimes it comes from grief. Sometimes fear. And sometimes it comes from riding around my own property thinking about human remains for absolutely no reason.
There’s range.
Eventually I stopped asking why all my stories kept getting dark and started following them.
That was probably the actual moment I became a horror writer. Not when I published my first horror novel. Earlier than that.
It happened when I stopped dragging every uncomfortable thought back toward something safer.
If it wanted to be weird, fine.
Let’s get weird.
If the grief wanted to stay, let it stay. If somebody heard a voice they should not be hearing, I wanted to know whose voice it was. If the person you trusted most suddenly felt wrong, I wanted to sit there for a while and figure out why.
I didn’t exactly choose horror.
I think eventually I just stopped arguing with it.