Jenna Moquin's Blog

A few years ago, I scoffed at the idea of content warnings. I thought putting them on my stories would ruin the suspense, the plot, the “aha” moments.

But then, after I lost someone suddenly in 2024, I realized how necessary they are…

Some context: I love horror movies. Love them. They’re my favorite movies to watch because they always give me everything I’m looking for in entertainment: thrills, goosebumps, suspense and tension, and then sweet relief when the killer is taken down and the final girl wins. It’s a wild ride, especially in a movie theater.

But after my cousin died, I couldn’t watch them anymore.

His death was a shock, nothing like I’ve ever experienced in my life before. I’ve lost loved ones, but losing someone to cancer or aging isn’t the same as having someone young ripped out of your life with no notice. The trauma of that did something to my heart, and my brain, and I’m still in repair.

I tried watching some horror movies last year, movies I’d been looking forward to like the adaptation of The Long Walk. And it was hell sitting in a theater watching young men die on screen. I’d thought I was ready, but I was not.

Now, whenever someone dies in a movie, specifically a young person (which happens a lot in horror), I can’t take it. My wound reopens and I feel the pain that their loved ones are going to feel, I feel it in my bones, the loss, the guilt, the lost chances of everything. Even though they’re just characters in a movie, I feel it. It’s rough being an empath sometimes.

So, I had to stop watching horror movies for a while. Which was a bummer because I used to consider them comfort movies, as weird as that sounds, but I know I’m not alone in that feeling. I really do prefer reading horror over watching it, because I have more control over the images that appear in my mind, instead of the images someone else chose for me to see.

This is what led me to start using content warnings and trigger warnings in my short stories and novels. Because I get it now. I understand why they are necessary. It was selfish of me to only care about whether a content warning would give away my plot, instead of potentially causing someone to read something they weren’t ready to experience, sending them into a hellish place that’s hard to climb out from.

And, now that I’ve started to use them, I actually like the teasers they give for my stories. I’m working on a collection of short stories right now, a blend of previously published work that I now have the rights to republish, and stories I’ve been querying for years but haven’t yet found a home. I think they fit in nicely in this new collection.

The content warning is actually a great way to entice readers. I mean, just look at the content warning I'm putting into the new collection:

Content Warning: The following stories contain depictions of kidnapping, home invasion, flight terror, self-harm, suicide, murder, domestic abuse, and entomophagy.

Doesn’t that make you want to read it?

Some of us have had the misfortune of meeting a Machiavellian character (or more than one), and letting them in. They’re very good at what they do between the flattery and generosity and making you feel welcome and loved.

But then this person will say or do something that makes your head tilt. A quiet, internal 'Huh. That’s weird…” and you will wonder about their motivations. Then a casual lie is thrown in, or perhaps they play dumb about an issue once confronted, and are apologetic, so you let it slide.

Most people let these things slide, that’s why narcissists and Machiavellians get away with it for so long. Most people, when they’re being gaslit, will question their own memories instead of the person gaslighting them, that’s why gaslighting is so effective—it turns your own mind against you.

Yet, if you’re the type of person who’s been victimized by people like this throughout your life, it really doesn’t work as well. In fact, the very first casual lie or act of playing dumb will put you on your guard, and your trust already begins to wane. You’ll want nothing to do with this person; it’s like a switch has been flipped on, shining a light on the dark soul who tried to victimize you, revealing their ugliness.

Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it, and the more it happens, the harder it gets to trust people. Every new person starts behind a wall they didn't build. For me, writing is a very therapeutic method of dealing with it. You know what they say: Take your broken heart, and turn it into art. The one great thing about the Machiavellian, is that they make great characters. Maleficent was most likely someone’s evil stepmother in real life, and Cruella de Vil was probably based on a toxic boss. Mean girls are real, and they exist outside of high school.

I’m getting better at dealing with these villains, because once you break free from a toxic relationship and realize your worth, their tactics no longer work. I just wish there weren’t so many of them out there… but I think that’s why I prefer staying single, keeping people at a safe emotional distance. Happy to live in my ice fortress like Elsa, finding peace in the silence.

2026 is going to be a prolific year for me.

My psychological horror Eyeland just released. This is a book I’ve been working on for years. It’s not going to be a crowd favorite, and I knew that when I decided to publish it. But it’s been a pet project of mine for some time, and there’s a lot of content in the book that’s relevant and I think it will resonate with readers.

My next release will be with Baynam Books Press, UK, and this is another book that’s very special to me, The Red Possession. It’s sort of a modern-day Exorcist, featuring a middle-aged protagonist going through perimenopause. I’ll share the cover once I have the full one from the publisher.

I’m also planning to release the audiobook for my debut thriller, Stalks, alongside the long-awaited (by my small fan base, at least) sequel. I’m still working out the proper title. I just don’t think “Stalks II” works for me.

And stay tuned for an upcoming book of short stories, and a suspense novella.

I really do hope people enjoy Eyeland, which was mostly inspired by the British show The Prisoner. If you’re not familiar with the show, you’ll probably say, “What the hell am I reading?” and that’s a fair reaction. That show was unhinged, and so is this book.

Years ago, a friend of mine asked me to read and critique a novel she’d written, and I happily agreed. About a year later, the same friend approached me and asked for another critique of the same story that she had revised, and I was hesitant.

Would I be able to give her a proper critique for a story I’d already read? I was worried, but agreed to do it. And it was a strange experience, re-reading a story that had changed.

Between certain characters dying and new plot points, and a different ending, she had changed a lot in the story. The characters weren’t doing the things I expected, and changing course made everything change for the story, and it just felt… wrong, somehow. It was like I kept waiting for the original story to surface, and it never did. That experience made me realize that re-reading a revised story isn’t really re-reading at all—it’s encountering a different version of something that already lived rent-free inside of me.

I’ve re-read books before; some of my favorite re-reads were The House on Haunted Hill by Shirley Jackson and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’ve also technically read Stephen King’s The Stand twice, having read the originally released version and the unabridged one years later. Aside from the additions in The Stand, these stories hadn’t changed, so re-reading them was like binge-watching a favorite show. Reading the unabridged version of The Stand was like watching the extended cuts in movies. Even with the expanded scenes, epilogue, and additional characters, the gist of the story was basically the same.

Re-reading a favorite book years later, a book that hasn’t been revised or changed, is actually a great experience. You catch things you didn’t notice on the first read; knowing the ending makes it easier to find the Easter eggs the author left in the pages, and it’s a lot of fun.
But re-reading a story that’s been revised is a strange experience. It’s interesting to notice the changes made, although sometimes you don’t like them, and it effectively changes your experience with the story. It was tough to admit to my friend that I didn’t really enjoy the revisions she’d made, but I stressed that it was only because the original story had a place in my heart, and the changes were much like the changes made in a movie adaptation. The first time you experience a story is sublime, only to you, and trying to morph it in some way makes a dent in the sacred place the tale holds in your heart. Any changes to it can feel somewhat wrong, even if the changes make sense for the big screen, and they typically do.

Perhaps this is why, when I read the book before seeing the movie, I prefer the book, but if I happen to see a movie that was adapted from a novel, and then read it afterward, I tend to prefer the movie. Because it’s the first time I’ve experienced the story.

I think asking someone for a second critique after multiple revisions can give the writer a mixed bag of suggestions, and it’s not always a great way to get an impartial critique. A fresh set of eyes on the revised manuscript can produce better results.

However, it is a great way to get a comparison on whether the changes made were the right way to go. Sometimes, as authors, we over-write our novels, which can be a mistake if we end up changing something that worked really well before. So, there are advantages to having someone re-critique a story after revisions, because the changes may not be the best course. Sometimes the hardest revision lesson is learning which parts of the story never needed changing at all.

I wrote a little holiday novella called The Cruelest Christmas. It was somewhat inspired by The Help, as the worst character in that book, Miss Hilly Holbrook, reminded me of someone I used to work for. She had a lot of power in that company, and made my life miserable. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with power who shouldn't have it because they're terrible people.

Her management style toward the high-volume team I was on, was akin to someone sitting on a lifeboat watching people drown, and instead of jumping in to help them swim, tells us how badly we're doing the breaststroke. And if you dared point out any errors on her part (which were vast), you were speaking to her disrespectfully, and there would be hell to pay in terms of project workload and hyper-criticism.

This woman, like Hilly Holbrook, was a narcissist. I know them all too well. My ex-husband was a narcissist, who also had a habit of gaslighting and manipulating me. It worked for a while because love is blind, but once the veil lifted, I saw what he was doing and it stopped working.

I think the reason there was friction between me and this woman is because I saw right through her. Someone who remembers every little thing, and can't be manipulated, is a toxic boss's worst nightmare.

The day I left that job I deleted her as a contact from my phone, and it's felt cleaner since. Writing this novella was a cathartic experience for me, and I can put that chapter of my life behind me.

When I was younger, I loved Christmas. It was my second favorite holiday (Halloween being the first), and I looked forward to the holiday season every year starting with Halloween.

The reason Christmas was so magical for me, the same reason it is for most kids, is that my parents made it magical. They decorated the house beautifully, and made it festive throughout the season. They hosted Thanksgiving with delicious food, and our tradition was to put up the Christmas tree and start decorating the house the day after Thanksgiving. We had candle lights in every window, to make sure Santa Claus would find our house, and I got excited to turn them on every night, just like my siblings. My brother, sister, and I would take turns (sometimes fighting) over who got to move the little mouse in our Advent calendar every day, counting down the days til Christmas.

My parents (mostly my mother, as it usually is) went all out on Christmas mornings. I held onto the belief that there was a real Santa Claus for as long as I could; I think I knew, in the back of my mind around age 7 or 8, that it couldn’t possibly be true. The apartment we lived in until I was 9 didn’t have a fireplace, so how could Santa get inside?

Having younger siblings helped me keep up the façade, since having children around you will always aid in believing in magic. But it was still fun, even when all three of us gave in and admitted we knew there was no such thing as Santa, and that it had been Mum and Dad all along.

Christmas began to lose its magic when I reached my mid-twenties, and I spent my first Christmas away from home in the apartment I rented with my boyfriend. We had just moved in together, and for our first Christmas, he got me a 3-foot bong.... A gift that was for him, not me. I felt very much like Marge on The Simpsons when Homer bought her a bowling ball, with his name on it.

I couldn’t tell my parents what he really bought me for Christmas, but of course, they wanted to know what my boyfriend got me, and I made something up. I think I said he got me a bunch of CDs or DVDs or something. But the fight we got into after that definitely made its mark, as he did much better for Christmases after. We even spent the night at my parents’ house on Christmas Eve a couple of times during our relationship, which eventually turned into a marriage that didn’t last.

My sister moved south and my brother followed soon after, and my parents flew down every year to spend Christmas with their grandchildren. The first Christmas I spent alone was the year after my husband and I divorced. And I didn’t mind it at all. I slept in, something I never got to do as a kid since my brother always woke us up at the crack of dawn. I ate delicious carbs and sweets and got drunk on wine watching holiday movies. I had fun opening the presents my mother stockpiled for me before flying south.

Over the next few years, I would occasionally spend this holiday alone. After my parents retired, they moved south and now live around the corner from my sister and not far from my brother. I’ve flown south a few times myself and it’s always nice to see my nieces and nephews; though now that they’ve grown older, they seem a bit less interested in hanging out with their auntie, and that’s okay.

Christmas is, in so many ways, a kid’s holiday, and once you lose the magic of being a child, Christmas can lose its magic, too.

Last Christmas was the worst one of my life. I flew down south, and was so excited to see my family. But the mood in the car when they picked me up was somber, and I couldn’t figure out why. Once we reached my sister’s house, my mother gave me the terrible news that my cousin Brian, only 47 years old, was found dead in his apartment. He was post-double-bypass, and the physician suspected it was a clot that took him.
I felt the world drop underneath me when she told me he died. I crumpled to a ball on the floor in tears, but didn’t want to upset my niece and locked myself into the bathroom, and took a shower, trying to wash the guilt away.

The guilt I felt over not checking in on him more, not calling or texting him more, not telling him enough how much I loved him, and how important he was to me. Why do we never appreciate something we have until it’s gone?

Grief is one of the worst emotions to deal with because it’s so unpredictable. The up and down feelings, the desperate need to go back to feeling like you felt before the terrible news and everything changed. We not only grieve the person we lost, but we grieve the person we were before this. Because I am not the same. There’s this austere seriousness in me that wasn’t there before December 22, 2024. Certain things that used to make me happy, silly, mundane things, just don’t do it for me anymore. The heavy feeling in my heart when it broke last year is still there, it’s just a bit dulled, easier to deal with every day.

So, this Christmas, I decided to stay put and lay low, not fly south and find myself getting triggered, reliving the darkest moment in my life when I stepped inside my sister’s kitchen and got the news about Brian. My family has been wonderful in understanding, and my mother and sister have shipped me a stockpile of gifts to open on Christmas.

I really do envy the people who love Christmas. I miss the magic it used to have—the kind that felt effortless and guaranteed.

But this year, I’m learning that it doesn’t have to look the same to still be meaningful. It can be quiet. It can be low-key. Maybe the magic comes back one day in a different form. Or maybe it doesn’t, and that’s okay, too. For now, I’m allowing myself to meet this Christmas where I am, not where I wish I were. And maybe that, in its own small way, is enough.

And maybe, just maybe, 2026 will be the greatest year of my life.

The Cemetery Spot

Join me on October 25th from 3-6PM at Mad Red Books in Las Vegas, I'll be with fellow local authors signing books!

Mad Red Books
9480 S Eastern Ave #105
Las Vegas, NV

Jenna Moquin’s short stories and poetry have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, Asylum Ink, Heater, 34 Orchard, PARABNORMAL Magazine, Das Gift, and Wicked Sick: An Anthology of the New England Horror Writers. In 2016 she released a collection of dark tales, Safe: New and Selected Stories. In 2021, she compiled a charity anthology featuring 1980s-themed horror stories, Totally Tubular Terrors. In 2024, her debut thriller STALKS was released, and her follow-up thriller THE CEMETERY SPOT was published 6 months later. She has 6 nieces and nephews she adores, and currently resides in Las Vegas while working on her latest story.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book had been on my TBR for some time, and my mom was kind enough to give me her copy to read. I was excited to read it, because I'd heard such great things about it and have always been interested in H.H. Holmes lore (one of the most fascinating and devious serial killers of all time).

The book was very well-written, and heavily researched, but it wasn't as suspenseful as I'd hoped it would be. It was akin to reading a textbook for school, which is why it took me so long to read it. There was a lot of factual information about the history of the World's fair, the architecture and the structures built for it, such as the first Ferris Wheel, but I was far more interested in reading about the architecture of H.H. Holmes' Murder Castle.

The book noted a piece of H.H. Holmes lore that I wasn't that familiar with, and found chilling: multiple people connected to his case died suspicious deaths soon after Holmes was hanged for his crimes, making one wonder about the claims that he had been the Devil himself.

-One of the coroner’s physicians who had testified against Holmes at his trial suddenly dropped dead from blood poisoning.

-The trial judge and lead coroner both died suddenly from previously un-diagnosed illness.

-The prison superintendent at Moyamensing Prison, where Holmes was held and executed, committed suicide.

-The jury foreman was electrocuted.

-Marion Hedgepeth, who had informed on Holmes’ insurance scam, was shot and killed during a holdup.

-The father of one of Holmes’ victims was horrifically burned in a gas explosion.

-The office of the claims manager for the insurance company Holmes had cheated caught fire and burned. Apparently the only untouched items inside were a framed copy of Holmes’ arrest warrant and two portraits of Holmes.


WHAT?!?! That's insane... and Devil in the White City effectively ended with this bit of knowledge, sending me straight to the podcasts to fall down a rabbit hole.



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Having two careers is tough, especially when they have opposing ideologies with regard to a certain new technology.

Being an author with a day job means that most of my free time is spent living the modern author’s life. Which, as every indie author knows, doesn’t just entail writing, revising and plot outlining. There’s marketing your work, networking, promoting other authors, making book covers and cover art, keeping your socials active, etc.

And now we have to compete with a whole generation of new writers who are using AI, which is a nice transition into the main point of this piece.

AI is here, and it’s not going anywhere. If anything, it’s going to get even worse depending on which angle you look at it from.

CEOs around the world are warning us that AI is Coming for Your Jobs https://www.yahoo.com/news/bosses-wan... and that workers need to embrace this technology, or get left behind. This is definitely the mindset at my day job in healthcare, a field that has been utilizing AI since it started. It’s revolutionized electronic health records, helping doctors complete their notes more easily so they can have more face to face time with their patients. I’ve been using ChatGPT for work emails, project layouts, action items, updating my resume. It really is a great tool.

But in my other career, the one I’m more passionate about, using AI is not acceptable, and not just for moral reasons—have you read the fiction AI produces?? I thought I’d give it a shot, and asked ChatGPT to write me a scene. I prompted it exactly what was needed in a scene where I was blocked, and what it produced was absolute crap. A regurgitated amalgam of the cheesiest pulp fiction thriller material I’ve ever seen. No bueno.

Some people think that AI fiction just isn’t there yet, and I firmly believe it will never be there because it is not human. Every writer’s work, simply due to the craft itself, is an amalgam of every lived experience the writer has had up to that point in their life. And that’s why we revise so much, because the writer you are today is completely different than the writer you were yesterday. Every day brings a new experience, a new thought, a new way of looking at life. This is probably why an English professor of mine once joked that no author should ever publish their work, because they’ll want to change everything years after it’s been published.

Should authors use AI to write their books? That’s a big HELL NO. Use AI for the thing we hate doing the most: marketing.

When I was in my mid-20s, I worked as an assistant at a residential property management company. They were starting to groom me to become a property manager, when I began having misgivings about the field. I observed the seasoned property managers, and noticed how stressed out they all were, pretty much all the time. Chewing on antacids daily, working well into the night, not seeing their families on holidays. It didn’t seem like the type of career I would want, and looking back on the company, I don’t think this was a common trend in the field—I think they were being managed by someone who was a bit toxic.

I ended up turning down the opportunity, and then found a new administrative job that paid a bit better and wasn’t nearly as stressful. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much different my life would’ve been had I taken this opportunity for a new career. I would have a lot more money in my 401k for sure, and would probably have purchased property of my own at some point. But I also would’ve been stuck living in that property, instead of getting to experience what life is like in different states in the U.S. I doubt I would have had the time, or the energy, to write my first novel at the age of 28, which got me addicted to storytelling, and I’ve written 7 novels since then.

For this reason, I have no regrets over declining that career opportunity with money and job security, even though I’m not doing great financially. My life experience was the road less traveled, and like Robert Frost said, that has made all the difference. The starving artists’ life was for me, Viva La Vie Boheme! Money will always come and go, but time, it just goes.