Welcome to My Nightmare
“Come inside and be afraid of this impressive mess I’ve made.”
—Disturbed, “Perfect Insanity”
Well, I’ve finally gotten around to checking off one of those things on my long (and ever-growing!) list of things to do. This. This thing you’re reading. This website and this blog.
I’ve been working at getting this whole “writing” thing off the ground for… remember when those sparkly vampires were super popular? Yeah. Those were still being adapted into movies when I queried my first manuscript. So, uh… yeah. It’s been a while, to say the least…
I don’t know what changed. Honestly. But at some point last year, I made a decision. I know. A Libra making a decision. Alert the press! I decided that I was done chasing the brass ring of traditional publishing because I would rather my work be out there to succeed or fail on its own merits than to forever languish in the query mines while my work collected digital dust in a computer’s memory.
So, with that in mind, I looked through all my completed manuscripts and settled on one to release. That one was The Origami Earth: Tír na nÓg. I opened it up, tinkered with it for a few months to add back cut content (say hi, chapters 13, 14, and 15!), and partnered with the former editor I’d been working with at Altered Reality Magazine, Allison Ivy (https://allisonivybooks.com/) to handle the proofreading and, by total coincidence, released it at the start of Pride Month 2026.
No. Seriously. I did not plan to release TNN, a spice-free young adult sapphic portal fantasy (borderline romantasy) specifically for Pride. I actually scheduled its release to coincide in such a way as to align with the May Blue Moon! I had completely forgotten Pride was even going on until I went into Downtown Pittsburgh to attend 3 Rivers Comicon. What were the freaking odds?!
After that, I decided to start cleaning off all the cyber dust from those manuscripts to revisit them. The next novel on the release schedule—The Secret of Hidden Creek—is actually getting ready to drop even as I write this, and by “getting ready,” I mean it’s coming out in 4 days! (I’m not freaking out! You’re freaking out! What? Me?! No, I’m not! You are!)
Vastly different from the flavor of TNN, The Secret of Hidden Creek is an upper middle-grade coming-of-age story with a supernatural twist on the boy-and-his-dog format—and by dog, I mean “dog”—inspired by my childhood love/hate relationship with those traumatic coming-of-age novels foisted upon us in school, particularly the novel I directly credit (blame?) for starting this whole “writing” thing: Bridge to Terabithia… consider that your warning (iykyk)!
I’ll be updating this blog regularly, but haven’t set a fixed posting schedule yet. Hopefully, I can make it at least a monthly thing, though I would prefer to settle into a weekly rhythm. We’ll see how things go.
So with all that said, in the words of Alice Cooper, “Welcome to my nightmare. I think you’re gonna like it.”
