Psst…it’s time for a brand new Creative Season! 

We’re stepping out of the dreamy haze of Languorous Summer, with its enchanted waterfalls and mossy caves, and slipping into something darker and stranger.

Say hello to our new theme…

Two threads will guide our way:

First, we’ll explore the shifting boundary between fact and fiction—something my character Ev Knox will be forced to confront head-on in The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays (coming Spring Equinox 2026).

Second, we’ll see what happens when the veil does more than just blur—when it frays and tears, letting things slip through (not all of them friendly).

We’ll start by peeling back the veil on my own writing journey.

Like Ev, I didn’t know what was waiting on the other side when I first sat down to write this story—only that once I did, there was no going back.

🥳 The Fool and the Threads of Time (Twin Flames, Book 0) was born on February 22, according to the handy timestamp.

I remember where I was, too: holed up in an Oklahoma City hotel room while my husband was trapped in a conference room for a week-long class.

For months my spirit guides had been nudging me to write a romance novel. (Yep, guides exist in my worldview, and they’re immensely helpful, if sometimes annoying in their persistence.)

At the time, I couldn’t have picked a more absurd project. I wasn’t a romance reader, and I wasn’t a fiction writer.

What could possibly go wrong? 🧐

But my guides wouldn’t let it drop, so I turned that Oklahoma week into an impromptu writing retreat.

Holy cow, was that first draft a blast to write.

It was also very, very bad, and I say that with love. (Seriously, no one will ever be allowed to read it.) Pretty much the only thing I carried into subsequent drafts was Ev’s first name.

That was the start of a three-year process.

I wish I’d kept track of how many drafts I went through, but it was at least thirty.

Somewhere around draft five or six, a series arc slowly emerged. The book had a gaggle of friends, it seemed, and they wanted to be invited to the party, too. A few drafts later, I spread out a set of index cards and mapped out the entire arc.

Round about year two, I realized if I ever wanted to finish the damn book, I desperately needed an outline. So I finally built a reverse outline—cue the parting of clouds and angelic choruses. ⛅

Oh, it was glorious! Instead of drowning in endless rewrites, I could hammer out the kinks in outline form, saving my energy for the actual writing. The outline transformed an unwieldy mess into a puzzle that was actually fun to solve. Who knew??

In hindsight, I’m grateful for those chaos years, because I learned a hundred things that don’t work for me and how to support the way my brain likes to craft stories.

Ideas aren’t my problem—if anything, I have too many, and without an outline, every draft gets progressively kitchen sink-ier until the whole house is underwater.

By the time I finished Book 0, the series arc had undergone extensive remodeling, and I knew I needed to scrap the original and begin again.

Which brings us back to the tarot…

Laying out the Major Arcana across my dining room table, I paired each card with the plot points I’d mapped out.

(The cards stayed there for a week, while we ate meals standing in the kitchen—sorry, husband!) 

My favorite part of outlining?

That moment when, in my mind’s eye, it shifts from scribbly index cards to a living web, each point connected to another, and another, until the whole thing vibrates with potential.

That’s when I know I’ve captured enough detail to move on.

I’ve also noticed a pattern in how my creative energy flows. In the early drafts of a book, 90% of my energy hums inside that book’s world. The other 10% flits about the series universe, seeding ideas for short stories, companion novellas, or future arcs.

But as I near the finish line, that free-floating energy starts orbiting the next book—plot downloads, snippets of dialogue, flashes of character arcs. The ratio shifts until suddenly I’m living 90% in the next story.

It’s like a relay race: one book hands the baton to the next.

And some books—like The Hermit (Book 9) and The Star (Book 17)—are especially magnetic. My imagination keeps returning to them, almost obsessively. It’s been fun breaking down why this is, so I can slather more of that magic sauce onto every book.

A major ingredient of the sauce…

…is creating a world I actually want to live in for the better part of a year.

This could include a story that grips me so much I start dreaming about it, characters with problems juicy enough to low-key stress me out (in a fun way!), or a setting that oozes a particular mood.

Which brings me to Harrowfell Hall. 

I love me some gothic novels where the setting is a character in its own right. A place brimming with dark secrets that you have to pry out of its cold, dead hands, only to wish you’d never gone digging in the first place.  

I already knew the basic (romantic) premise of my next book,The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays:

Ev Knox’s debut novel is an overnight sensation, and Matt Byrne—the internet’s smoking hot boyfriend—gets cast as the love interest in the film adaptation. 

I also knew I’d be thrusting Ev, a professional introvert, into the chaotic world of the film set, but I didn’t have a clue where that would be. Definitely not a soundstage. (Yawn.)

Hmm…how about a secluded castle built in the late 1700s by an eccentric heir to a coal-mining fortune who dabbled in occultism and—if the rumors are true—sex magic?

Now we’re getting warmer. Forget “only one bed.” Only one haunted castle, baby! 👻

And stepping outside? Not much safer. You see, Harrowfell is tucked deep in the woods where hikers keep vanishing. And Margot Takada, local expert on Harrowfell’s hauntings, claims to have found bizarrely oversized hoofprints disappearing into the trees. 

Naturally, that means only one thing.

Ev is stuck inside Harrowfell with Matt Byrne, doing her level best to remember she has a boyfriend back home and that it should not matter if her celebrity crush is even hotter (and sweeter) in person. 

Easier said than done when Matt—famous for guarding his love life like a state secret—suddenly acts like the only thing he wants to keep all to himself…is her. 🥵

Okay, now that is a story I can live in for a year, and I’ve barely told you anything about the haunting yet! 

Next time, we’ll peel back the veil and explore the grounds of Harrowfell.