The thing I keep returning to in every book — and probably always will — is mental struggle, and how a person keeps going anyway.
Like everyone, I carry a history of good and bad encounters, and the work of sorting through them happens internally, long after.
So these stories are how I explore it: by imagining the kind of person I’d like to be, and letting her face what I’m still working out.
The goal of an artist is to be unignorable.
Children of Avalon was the first story I ever wrote down. I’ve had story ideas knocking around my brain for most of my life — that was the one I finally committed to the page, and then published.
I didn’t know whether I’d keep going. But once it was out, I was hooked: on the storytelling, and unexpectedly on the business of indie publishing. So I kept going.
Every book since has circled the same theme — light against dark, and how that struggle lives both around us and inside us. Light and dark aren’t just the world my characters move through. They’re characters themselves, and the struggle inside each person.
My characters do the exploring for me. Each of them meets those struggles differently — some messily, some head-on — and to write any of them honestly, I have to get outside my own head and look squarely at myself, and at the world the rest of us are navigating too.
That’s the part I didn’t expect. Writing forces me to think clearly about whatever I’m wrestling with, because I can’t put it on the page until I actually understand it.
I thought I was just telling a fun fantasy story. It turned out to be a lot more useful than that.
For the joy of it, mostly. There’s a particular satisfaction in getting a story out of my head and onto a page where someone else can find it.
And I’m more myself when I’m writing than when I’m not.