Author: staceyjaine

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.

One does simply not write without an outline… or do they?

Yes. They absolutely do.

I used to believe every story needed a meticulous roadmap. Color-coded notes. Character sheets. Timelines. Chapter breakdowns. I would spend weeks outlining, rearranging plot points, perfecting backstories no reader would ever see. By the time I finally started drafting, I was exhausted. Worse—I was bored. I’d already told myself the story.

Now, I spend far less time outlining and far more time writing. And for me, that shift has made all the difference.

Writing without an outline doesn’t mean beginning with nothing. It doesn’t mean wandering blindly across a blank page, hoping something coherent appears. It simply means beginning with something small. A spark instead of a blueprint. A question instead of a map.

For me, that spark often comes in the form of a what if.

What if Belle wasn’t the beauty in the fairytale—but the beast?

That single question became the foundation for my short story Stealing Beauty, published in 2019 by Iron Faerie Publishing in their FABLE anthology. I didn’t start with a three-act structure. I started with tension. With inversion. With curiosity. And as I followed that thread, scene by scene, the story revealed itself.

That same approach works for novels, too.

The idea for my forthcoming novel, Dandelions, began with an image: a yellow dandelion pushing stubbornly up through the grass beneath a wrought iron fence. Something fragile forcing its way into a place it wasn’t meant to grow. Something bright in a space meant to contain it.

My children used to love making wishes on dandelions when they were little. They’d close their eyes, blow the seeds into the air, and believe with their whole hearts that something magical might happen.

There’s story in that. Hope. Confinement. Resilience. Wishes. Loss. Memory.

I didn’t outline a plot first. I followed the feeling.

That’s the beauty of starting small. A single image. A single question. A single moment heavy with possibility. From there, you ask more questions. You explore consequences. You let characters react. You allow the story to surprise you.

Some writers thrive on detailed outlines. They build cathedrals before laying the first stone. And that’s wonderful.

But others—myself included—build as they go. We discover the shape of the cathedral while standing inside it.

Writing inspiration comes from anywhere: a childhood memory, a passing comment, a photograph, a fairytale turned sideways. You don’t need a long, elaborate outline before you begin. You need curiosity. You need momentum. You need permission to start before you feel fully ready.

Sometimes the best way to find your story is simply to begin writing it.

Today, I said goodbye to my grandad.

He was 94 — the fourth of eight children, and a man who carried a lifetime of stories with him, most of them about family. He could spin a yarn like no one else, and somehow, they never got old.

He loved horses and books, fishing and crabbing and camping. Some of my best memories are of crabbing with him on his boat, or being handed Black Beauty when I’d run out of books. He loved Slim Dusty and countless other things like gardening and cooking.

He had that rare kind of presence — the kind that didn’t demand attention but earned it anyway. You always knew when he was in the room, not because he made noise, but because he made space. For laughter, for memory, for belonging.

I often wonder if I was drawn to writing because I grew up listening to his stories, or if it was just happenstance. Either way, I know this much: the final book in The Eldritch Series is dedicated to both him and my nanna. It feels right to honour those who came before me — the ones who shaped me long before I ever put pen to page.

If you’d like to read it, Sovereignty is available for preorder here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FFG7PHCP