my writing

i'm currently working on my first novel! its heavily inspired by my love of horror, history, and surrealism :) the working title is ondine, but i may change that

♥ Setting Plot Influences Art

little blurbs about my book because i'm obsessed with it. navigate via the headings above.

the year is 1927, and it's a rainy and frigid september. the action takes place in a fictional middle-American town that I've designated as W----. Primarily for the reason that it's a work in progress and I needed a placeholder, but it's also a little nod to early epistolary novels, which use similar formatting of place-names.

Leo Blackburn is working and living at her bookstore when she recieves dire news: the aunt she hasn't seen for five years has passed away, leaving their already unorthodox family more strange than before. The aunt leaves to Leo a hatbox of keys to sort through, and the promise that after she uncovers what they have to tell, she can do what she wishes with their large house on the outskirts of W---. Tensions arise as familial dynamics are re-enacted and subverted in the presence of changed personalities. As Leo slowly uncovers a series of entries placed and hidden by her aunt, she is forced to confront the truth about her childhood hero, and about the secrets she herself has been keeping from her family.

a.k.a. themes and things I have in mind while writing, including but not limited to:

the nature of haunted houses
different approaches and justifications of secrecy
the life-cycles of aquatic organisms
inherent risk of 'self' that comes with connection
just the idea of horror -- is it a sociocultural muscle, or are there things that horrify all of us?

none of this project would've been at it's current point if my friend Abigail hadn't encouraged me to write it all down. (thanks, A♥) below are a few of the drawings and doodles I created while explaining chunks of my story to her.

i think mimicry is inherent to children, especially alienated ones. So writing is pretty instinctual, especially if one has a love of books, because it's mimicry of the world, and of language, in order to understand it. for years I wrote but didn't share at all. then, for a very sad stretch of years, I didn't write or read very much. it was only after starting to write a diary for my own mental health that I came back to writing (and reading, by extension). i think that the creative instinct is not one easily ran away from, and moreover that the benefit of indulging it far outweighs the risk.