Even in a Haunted World, People Are Still People

As a writer, I don't start with worlds. I start with people.

That may sound slightly suspicious coming from someone who writes paranormal and fantasy stories full of ghosts, witches, vampires, werewolves, the occasional demon or dragon, and plenty of magic, but it's true. I'm far less interested in building a dazzling supernatural backdrop just for the sake of it than I am in figuring out who, exactly, is standing in the middle of it and what emotional mess they've brought with them.

Because let's be honest: even in a haunted world, people are still people.

For me, writing has always been about taking something real, like longing, fear, loneliness, and desire, all the beautifully inconvenient things we haul around with us, and turning it just enough so it catches the light differently. That's where paranormal and fantasy earn their keep for me. Not because they help me avoid real life, but because they let me come at it sideways. Sometimes a ghost can tell the truth faster than realism can. Sometimes a witch, a vampire, or a werewolf can slip past the defenses realism tends to trigger. And sometimes magic just lets you say the quiet part out loud.

And maybe that's one reason I keep coming back to it.

I write characters who feel real enough that readers might recognize them, or worse, recognize themselves in them. But I place them in worlds where the rules bend just enough to make room for reinvention, courage, transformation, and the occasional deliciously dramatic supernatural detour. That's especially true when I'm writing queer characters.

I Don't Invent Characters. I Meet Them.

My characters never come out of nowhere. They're pulled from observation, from people I've known, from bits of myself, from queer community, from the world around me. They're layered, evolving, sometimes messy, occasionally chaotic, and usually carrying more than they let on. In other words, excellent fictional company.

I don't think characters are ever really finished. I think we meet them at a certain point in their lives and then, if we're lucky, we get to watch them surprise us. That's true on the page, and maybe even more so in life. Sometimes they step onto the page almost fully formed. Other times, they show up like a fabulous guest, forty minutes late and still not emotionally prepared. Which is a fancy way of saying I don't always know who someone is until they tell me, and part of the joy of writing is in the discovery.

That's the thing I love most about writing paranormal and fantasy. When you bring magic into a story, whether it arrives as a ghost, a spell, a curse, a werewolf, a dramatic vampire, or some other strange little rupture in reality, it opens a way into identity, struggle, desire, and change that feels sharper and sometimes safer, too. It lets you sneak up on the truth and gives readers room to feel something before they even realize they're being asked to look at it.

And sometimes, best of all, you can give your characters the kinds of wins queer people don't always get often enough in the real world.

Opening the Door (Mind the Ghosts)

So here I am, stepping out a little more publicly with that work. I've been writing queer stories for a while now, but this is the first time I'm really opening the door and saying, come in, meet these people, and see what I've been building.

The easiest way in is Séance & Sensimilla, my free reader novella. It's out now, it's yours for the price of an email address, and for something I'm giving away, there is an alarming amount happening in it. Get your free copy and start there.

It's a peek into a much bigger world, the first real doorway into Neon Saint, and for me it marked a genuine shift, both because I finally put it in front of readers and because it changed how I approach characters as a writer.

With this story, I found myself paying closer attention to who these characters were before I threw them onto the page and to who they became once I did. I still don't fully map a character from head to toe before writing because I need space for surprise, contradiction, and the occasional slightly unhinged choice that forces me to understand why they made it. But Séance & Sensimilla helped me deepen that process. It reminded me that a character sheet is not a character. People live in the gap between who they think they are and who they turn out to be when something goes wrong.

Which is also not a bad description of most of us.

Screaming Into the Void, but With Better Lighting

As a queer writer living in Portugal, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to make art in a moment when the world feels louder and meaner than it should. Looking back at the U.S., my home country, I see so much political chaos, so much noise, and so much energy spent trying to make queer people smaller and quieter. And that kind of unrest never stays neatly in one place. It leaks. It spreads. It finds you even from a safe distance.

Writing has become my way of answering that, which is probably the writerly version of screaming into the void, only with better lighting and more ghosts.

I'm not out to turn every story into a political speech, because frankly that's not the fiction I want to write. What I want is to put queer people on the page and refuse to make them smaller. To let them be magical, funny, wounded, bold, frightened, sexy, grieving, ridiculous, loving, and brave, sometimes all in the same chapter, and to give them room to exist fully in genres where they absolutely belong.

We Belong in the Haunted Alley, Too

And really, where else would we be?

We belong in more than realist literary fiction, trauma narratives, or stories where queerness has to be explained, defended, or politely framed for other people's comfort. We belong in haunted cities, magical underworlds, cursed alleyways, enchanted love stories, and weird little paranormal corners where the dead won't stay dead, a werewolf is making bad decisions, a vampire is being dramatic, and somebody absolutely kisses the wrong person under the moonlight.

If there's a haunted alley, a cursed object, suspicious moonlight, or a demon with absolutely no sense of personal boundaries involved, I'd argue we belong there even more.

What I Hope You Take With You

Here's what I actually want you to walk away with. Not a plot point. Not a cool supernatural premise. I want you to feel like you met someone, someone who sticks around after the last page. Maybe it's a line that lodges itself somewhere inconvenient, or a weird little emotional bruise you keep pressing just to see if it still hurts. I want you to finish one of my stories and think, well damn, I'd like to know what happened to that person next.

That's the magic I actually care about. No séance required, although I'm not ruling one out.

Maybe it makes you laugh. Maybe it knocks something loose. Maybe it leaves you seeing yourself, or someone else, a little differently. Or maybe it just becomes one of those stories you carry around without noticing, an odd little thread in the back of your mind that turns up again later, usually at an inconvenient hour.

That's the kind of story I keep chasing. The kind that moves in and refuses to leave quietly.

So no, I'm not writing paranormal and fantasy purely for the fun of ghosts, glamour, vampires, werewolves, dragons, and magical chaos, though I will admit a weakness for all of the above. I write these stories because they let me step outside the noise for a minute, look at life from another angle, and come back feeling a little less powerless.

And because underneath all the glitter and the hauntings, they help me make sense of the world and feel a little less alone in it.