There’s a moment in almost every story I write where things stop being simple.
Where the line between right and wrong blurs. Where love isn’t soft or easy or safe. Where survival starts to cost something.
That’s usually the point where people ask—why go there?
Why not keep it lighter? Easier? Kinder?
Why paranormal romance… and why let it get dark?
The honest answer is: because that’s where the truth is.
Not the literal truth—wolves and fae and magic slipping through the cracks of the world—but the emotional kind. The kind that sits underneath everything. The kind that doesn’t always have neat edges or happy endings wrapped in a bow.
Writing, for me, has always been an escape.
So has reading.
A way to step sideways out of the world and into something quieter. Something that makes more sense. Something I can control.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in stories—sometimes because I wanted to be, sometimes because I needed to be. And if I’m being honest, I suspect a lot of that ties into the way my brain works. The way I process things. The way I’ve always felt just slightly out of step with everything around me.
Stories gave me a place where that didn’t matter.
Or maybe more accurately—they gave me a place to understand it.
And I think that’s why my characters end up the way they do.
Scarlett and Zooey both carry pieces of me.
Zooey came from the earlier parts of my life—the questions, the structure, the push and pull between what you’re taught to believe and what doesn’t quite sit right.
Scarlett is something else.
Another version of me, in a different shape. Harder. Sharper. Less willing to bend. The kind of character that takes everything that hurt and refuses to let it define her quietly.
Writing her wasn’t easy.
But it was… cathartic.
Because paranormal romance gives me space to explore all of that.
To take the things we don’t always say out loud—grief, anger, survival, identity—and push them just far enough into the unreal that we can actually look at them.
Because it’s easier, sometimes, to understand a girl who doesn’t belong in either world than it is to unpack what it feels like to not quite belong in your own life.
It’s easier to talk about monsters when they have fangs.
But the darkness in these stories isn’t there for shock value. It’s not there just to make things dramatic or intense.
It’s there because darkness shapes people.
It forces choices.
It reveals who someone is when everything else is stripped away.
And love—real love, the kind worth writing about—doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the middle of all of that. Messy. Complicated. Sometimes fragile. Sometimes fierce enough to survive things it probably shouldn’t.
That’s the version of romance that interests me.
Not perfect people finding each other at the perfect time.
But broken, complicated people standing in the aftermath of everything they’ve been through and choosing something anyway.
Choosing to stay.
Choosing to fight.
Choosing to feel.
Even when it would be easier not to.
I think that’s why I keep coming back to these kinds of stories.
The ones where magic doesn’t fix things—it complicates them.
Where the past doesn’t stay buried.
Where survival isn’t the end of the journey… just the beginning of something harder.
Because those are the stories that feel real to me.
The ones that ask not just what if magic exists?
But what if you had to live with the consequences of it?
And somewhere in all of that—between the shadows and the choices and the things that refuse to stay buried—that’s where the Eldritch Universe took shape.
That’s where the Eldritch Universe took shape.
If you want to step into that world, you can start with Zooey’s story HERE, or meet Scarlett HERE.
Not as an escape from reality.
But as a way of understanding it.
