Jason Garman's Blog
June 16, 2026
How a Failed Short Story Became a Novella
On June 30, my new novella, Viscera Varnish, will be released.
Part literary horror, part psychological suspense, and part dark character study, Viscera Varnish explores artistic obsession, identity, ambition, and the dangerous pursuit of authenticity. It’s a story about creation, transformation, and what happens when the desire to make something meaningful begins to consume the person doing the creating.
Like most of my projects, Viscera Varnish didn’t begin with a detailed outline or a grand plan. In fact, it almost never happened at all.
Last year, after finishing Reflections in the Dark, I decided I wanted to spend some time writing short fiction. Part of that was practical. I wanted stories for my Substack. Part of it was because I hoped to submit some work to anthologies. Mostly, though, I just wanted to experiment. I wrote a handful of short stories and then stumbled onto an idea that seemed simple enough.
At the time, I was thinking very much in terms of Tales from the Crypt. I wanted to write the kind of horror story where we follow a genuinely bad person as they march steadily toward the consequences of their actions. The setup was straightforward: a serial killer, a dark secret, and an ending where everything comes crashing down around him.
The problem was that what I wrote wasn’t very good.
Now, I say that as someone who genuinely loves cheesy horror. I love over-the-top villains. I love camp. I love the pulpy, twisted morality plays that Tales from the Crypt did so well. But the story I wrote didn’t feel clever or fun. It felt cartoonish in a bad way.
The killer, who didn’t even have a name yet, spent most of the story behaving like a caricature. Looking back on it, he did everything short of twirling a mustache like a silent film villain. The entire thing felt exaggerated, predictable, and hollow. I didn’t hate the idea. I hated what I had done with it. So, I did what writers sometimes have to do.
I gave up on it.
At least temporarily.
I assumed it was one of those ideas that simply wasn’t going to work. Not every story deserves to be finished, and I figured this one would quietly join the growing pile of abandoned drafts on my hard drive.
But something about it kept bothering me. I found myself returning to it and slowly, the story began to change. What started as a disposable horror short about a cartoonishly evil serial killer began evolving into something stranger, darker, and far more personal. Little did I know, that failed short story was about to become Viscera Varnish.
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about the serial killer and started thinking about obsession.
At the time, I had just finished my first novel. Like most writers, I was already asking myself the question that inevitably follows finishing a major project:
What’s next?
I was looking for inspiration. Looking for another story. Looking for another idea that felt worth pursuing. I had lots of rough drafts sitting around from years of coming up with ideas but no clue what to do with them or how to expand them.
Anybody who creates anything understands that feeling. At some point, you find yourself staring at the wall wondering where the next great idea, performance, or breakthrough is supposed to come from.
That’s when the idea for Daniel Virek arrived.
Instead of focusing on a serial killer, I became fascinated by the idea of an artist who desperately needed inspiration and was willing to pursue it at any cost.
Not money or fame. Inspiration itself.
Daniel emerged as a once-celebrated artistic genius whose best work appears to be behind him. He has already reached the mountaintop. The problem is that he can no longer find his way back there. I think that’s a fear that exists in almost every creative field.
Daniel became my way of exploring that fear.
The story naturally gravitated toward painting because visual artists have always fascinated me. I have tremendous respect for painters and illustrators. In a million years I couldn’t do what they do. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Yet they can take a blank canvas and somehow create something entirely new from it. That process feels almost magical to me.
So, I began building the story around that world.
At first, I still believed I was writing a short story. That was the plan anyway.
Two thousand words. Maybe twenty-five hundred. Three thousand at the absolute maximum.
That plan lasted exactly one chapter.
The first chapter came in at roughly 3,500 words before editing. At that point I remember looking at the manuscript and thinking:
Well... I don’t think this is a short story anymore. 😂
The deeper I got into Daniel’s character, the more questions I wanted to explore. The more I wrote, the larger the story became. New scenes appeared and the mythology expanded. Eventually I went back and rewrote the opening entirely. What had originally been Chapter One became Chapter Two. A completely new opening took its place.
Somewhere along the way, the failed short story I had nearly abandoned transformed into a novella. What began as an idea I was ready to throw away became a project I couldn’t stop thinking about.
One of the things I love most about writing is that stories rarely stay within the boundaries you originally set for them. I remember hearing Stephen King talk about following your characters and allowing the story to take you where it wants to go. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea stuck with me.
That’s exactly what happened with Viscera Varnish. The version of the story I ended up publishing is not the version I sat down to write. What began as a simple horror short story evolved into something much stranger because I stopped trying to force it in a particular direction and started following Daniel Virek instead. The more I wrote him, the more interesting he became. The story became less about what was happening around him and more about what was happening inside him.
At some point I realized that Daniel wasn’t simply a villain. He was relatable, to an extent, but certainly not a hero. He was complex to say the least.
Some of my favorite stories ask readers to spend time with people they would never want to meet in real life. Characters who are selfish, obsessive, destructive, or morally compromised. The challenge is convincing the reader to keep following them anyway.
For inspiration, I found myself thinking a lot about writers like Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk.
Barker has always impressed me with his ability to find beauty inside horror and horror inside beauty. His work often explores obsession, transformation, desire, and the consequences of pushing beyond ordinary limits.
Palahniuk, meanwhile, has a gift for placing readers inside the heads of deeply flawed people and forcing them to sit with that discomfort. His work frequently explores transgression, identity, and the strange things human beings are capable of convincing themselves are justified.
Both influences found their way into Viscera Varnish.
More than anything, I wanted to explore that uncomfortable relationship readers develop with certain characters.
You meet someone and sympathize with them.
Then they do something questionable.
Then something worse.
And before long, you find yourself asking a difficult question:
How much am I willing to forgive because I understand why they’re doing it?
That tension became one of the driving forces behind the novella. Daniel is chasing greatness. Relevance and inspiration. Those goals are understandable. The problem is the lengths he’s willing to go to achieve them.
And that’s where the horror begins.
Eventually, the writing was finished on a short story I had nearly abandoned. The failed Tales from the Crypt idea I had been convinced wasn’t working. It had somehow transformed into a 25,000-word novella.
Now I needed a cover.
If writing the book taught me anything, it’s that knowing your strengths is important. One of the things I know for certain is that I am not a cover designer. I gave it a shot anyway.
At one point, the working title for the book was Murder Art, and I opened Canva and attempted to create my own cover. The result was... well, let’s just say there's a reason why professional cover artists exist.
Around the same time, I was a member of a Facebook group called Sinister Scribes, a community of authors and artists. One of the great things about the group is the number of talented artists and cover designers who are part of it. I reached out to a few people. For various reasons, those projects didn’t end up working out. Then I came across the work of Matthew Wildasin.
I immediately loved what he was doing. His artwork had atmosphere. It had personality and felt unique. So, I contacted him, explained the concept, and asked if he might be interested. The concept was different from what he was used to. But he was willing to take a shot at it if I was willing to trust him.
That was an easy decision. I gave him the concept, and what he sent back exceeded every expectation I had.
He had nailed it.
From the very first concepts, I knew he understood what I was trying to accomplish. The finished cover feels like a painting with a person trapped inside it. It captures the artistic obsession, the unease, and the surreal quality of the story in a way I never could have achieved myself. I couldn’t be happier with the result. It’s also why Matthew is currently working on the cover for my next book.
Somewhere along the way, the title changed as well. For a long time, the project was known as Murder Art. Even now, I occasionally catch myself calling it that. When you’ve spent months working under a title, it tends to stick. But eventually I wanted something more distinctive. Something that reflected both the artistic themes of the novella and the darker places the story eventually goes.
I toyed with lots of titles combing violence and art, but eventually my love of alliteration and strangeness won out, and Viscera Varnish was born. It felt unique and unsettling. Most importantly, it felt like the book.
And now, after all the false starts, abandoned drafts, rewrites, title changes, and unexpected turns, the book is finally ready.
What began as a short story I almost deleted became a novella I genuinely love.
Viscera Varnish releases June 30.Viscera Varnish: A Novella
Part literary horror, part psychological suspense, and part dark character study, Viscera Varnish explores artistic obsession, identity, ambition, and the dangerous pursuit of authenticity. It’s a story about creation, transformation, and what happens when the desire to make something meaningful begins to consume the person doing the creating.
Like most of my projects, Viscera Varnish didn’t begin with a detailed outline or a grand plan. In fact, it almost never happened at all.
Last year, after finishing Reflections in the Dark, I decided I wanted to spend some time writing short fiction. Part of that was practical. I wanted stories for my Substack. Part of it was because I hoped to submit some work to anthologies. Mostly, though, I just wanted to experiment. I wrote a handful of short stories and then stumbled onto an idea that seemed simple enough.
At the time, I was thinking very much in terms of Tales from the Crypt. I wanted to write the kind of horror story where we follow a genuinely bad person as they march steadily toward the consequences of their actions. The setup was straightforward: a serial killer, a dark secret, and an ending where everything comes crashing down around him.
The problem was that what I wrote wasn’t very good.
Now, I say that as someone who genuinely loves cheesy horror. I love over-the-top villains. I love camp. I love the pulpy, twisted morality plays that Tales from the Crypt did so well. But the story I wrote didn’t feel clever or fun. It felt cartoonish in a bad way.
The killer, who didn’t even have a name yet, spent most of the story behaving like a caricature. Looking back on it, he did everything short of twirling a mustache like a silent film villain. The entire thing felt exaggerated, predictable, and hollow. I didn’t hate the idea. I hated what I had done with it. So, I did what writers sometimes have to do.
I gave up on it.
At least temporarily.
I assumed it was one of those ideas that simply wasn’t going to work. Not every story deserves to be finished, and I figured this one would quietly join the growing pile of abandoned drafts on my hard drive.
But something about it kept bothering me. I found myself returning to it and slowly, the story began to change. What started as a disposable horror short about a cartoonishly evil serial killer began evolving into something stranger, darker, and far more personal. Little did I know, that failed short story was about to become Viscera Varnish.
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about the serial killer and started thinking about obsession.
At the time, I had just finished my first novel. Like most writers, I was already asking myself the question that inevitably follows finishing a major project:
What’s next?
I was looking for inspiration. Looking for another story. Looking for another idea that felt worth pursuing. I had lots of rough drafts sitting around from years of coming up with ideas but no clue what to do with them or how to expand them.
Anybody who creates anything understands that feeling. At some point, you find yourself staring at the wall wondering where the next great idea, performance, or breakthrough is supposed to come from.
That’s when the idea for Daniel Virek arrived.
Instead of focusing on a serial killer, I became fascinated by the idea of an artist who desperately needed inspiration and was willing to pursue it at any cost.
Not money or fame. Inspiration itself.
Daniel emerged as a once-celebrated artistic genius whose best work appears to be behind him. He has already reached the mountaintop. The problem is that he can no longer find his way back there. I think that’s a fear that exists in almost every creative field.
Daniel became my way of exploring that fear.
The story naturally gravitated toward painting because visual artists have always fascinated me. I have tremendous respect for painters and illustrators. In a million years I couldn’t do what they do. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Yet they can take a blank canvas and somehow create something entirely new from it. That process feels almost magical to me.
So, I began building the story around that world.
At first, I still believed I was writing a short story. That was the plan anyway.
Two thousand words. Maybe twenty-five hundred. Three thousand at the absolute maximum.
That plan lasted exactly one chapter.
The first chapter came in at roughly 3,500 words before editing. At that point I remember looking at the manuscript and thinking:
Well... I don’t think this is a short story anymore. 😂
The deeper I got into Daniel’s character, the more questions I wanted to explore. The more I wrote, the larger the story became. New scenes appeared and the mythology expanded. Eventually I went back and rewrote the opening entirely. What had originally been Chapter One became Chapter Two. A completely new opening took its place.
Somewhere along the way, the failed short story I had nearly abandoned transformed into a novella. What began as an idea I was ready to throw away became a project I couldn’t stop thinking about.
One of the things I love most about writing is that stories rarely stay within the boundaries you originally set for them. I remember hearing Stephen King talk about following your characters and allowing the story to take you where it wants to go. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea stuck with me.
That’s exactly what happened with Viscera Varnish. The version of the story I ended up publishing is not the version I sat down to write. What began as a simple horror short story evolved into something much stranger because I stopped trying to force it in a particular direction and started following Daniel Virek instead. The more I wrote him, the more interesting he became. The story became less about what was happening around him and more about what was happening inside him.
At some point I realized that Daniel wasn’t simply a villain. He was relatable, to an extent, but certainly not a hero. He was complex to say the least.
Some of my favorite stories ask readers to spend time with people they would never want to meet in real life. Characters who are selfish, obsessive, destructive, or morally compromised. The challenge is convincing the reader to keep following them anyway.
For inspiration, I found myself thinking a lot about writers like Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk.
Barker has always impressed me with his ability to find beauty inside horror and horror inside beauty. His work often explores obsession, transformation, desire, and the consequences of pushing beyond ordinary limits.
Palahniuk, meanwhile, has a gift for placing readers inside the heads of deeply flawed people and forcing them to sit with that discomfort. His work frequently explores transgression, identity, and the strange things human beings are capable of convincing themselves are justified.
Both influences found their way into Viscera Varnish.
More than anything, I wanted to explore that uncomfortable relationship readers develop with certain characters.
You meet someone and sympathize with them.
Then they do something questionable.
Then something worse.
And before long, you find yourself asking a difficult question:
How much am I willing to forgive because I understand why they’re doing it?
That tension became one of the driving forces behind the novella. Daniel is chasing greatness. Relevance and inspiration. Those goals are understandable. The problem is the lengths he’s willing to go to achieve them.
And that’s where the horror begins.
Eventually, the writing was finished on a short story I had nearly abandoned. The failed Tales from the Crypt idea I had been convinced wasn’t working. It had somehow transformed into a 25,000-word novella.
Now I needed a cover.
If writing the book taught me anything, it’s that knowing your strengths is important. One of the things I know for certain is that I am not a cover designer. I gave it a shot anyway.
At one point, the working title for the book was Murder Art, and I opened Canva and attempted to create my own cover. The result was... well, let’s just say there's a reason why professional cover artists exist.
Around the same time, I was a member of a Facebook group called Sinister Scribes, a community of authors and artists. One of the great things about the group is the number of talented artists and cover designers who are part of it. I reached out to a few people. For various reasons, those projects didn’t end up working out. Then I came across the work of Matthew Wildasin.
I immediately loved what he was doing. His artwork had atmosphere. It had personality and felt unique. So, I contacted him, explained the concept, and asked if he might be interested. The concept was different from what he was used to. But he was willing to take a shot at it if I was willing to trust him.
That was an easy decision. I gave him the concept, and what he sent back exceeded every expectation I had.
He had nailed it.
From the very first concepts, I knew he understood what I was trying to accomplish. The finished cover feels like a painting with a person trapped inside it. It captures the artistic obsession, the unease, and the surreal quality of the story in a way I never could have achieved myself. I couldn’t be happier with the result. It’s also why Matthew is currently working on the cover for my next book.
Somewhere along the way, the title changed as well. For a long time, the project was known as Murder Art. Even now, I occasionally catch myself calling it that. When you’ve spent months working under a title, it tends to stick. But eventually I wanted something more distinctive. Something that reflected both the artistic themes of the novella and the darker places the story eventually goes.
I toyed with lots of titles combing violence and art, but eventually my love of alliteration and strangeness won out, and Viscera Varnish was born. It felt unique and unsettling. Most importantly, it felt like the book.
And now, after all the false starts, abandoned drafts, rewrites, title changes, and unexpected turns, the book is finally ready.
What began as a short story I almost deleted became a novella I genuinely love.
Viscera Varnish releases June 30.Viscera Varnish: A Novella
April 19, 2026
Finally Finishing a Book!
Reflections in the Dark
Picking up where I left off, I had my two lead characters, and I had the case. At the time, I was calling it The Two Marys.
That was the working title, and everything I was doing early on was centered around the investigation. I always knew I wanted the book to start grounded: detectives, casework, interviews, evidence. Something that felt real before anything else crept in. So that’s where I lived for a while.
Most of what I was writing early on were scenes with Maria Voss and Captain Bryans working the case. Going through each Mary Johnson, piece by piece, and as I wrote those, the details started getting stranger. Not wildly supernatural right away, but just enough to make Maria start to feel like something wasn’t adding up. That was the tone I wanted. Not chaos, just… unease.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped and realized something. I had written five chapters of Maria and nothing for Reed.
Which is funny, because when I first started this whole thing, Reed was the only character I could think of. But once I actually sat down and started writing, I got locked into Maria’s perspective. That’s just how it went.
And then I hit a wall. How do I even introduce Reed into this? That was one of the hardest parts of the entire process.
The case was working. The investigation was moving. But Reed existed in a completely different space, and I couldn’t figure out how to bring him in without it feeling forced. So, I went back to what got the story going for me in the first place—Inland Empire.
That same idea again: don’t overthink it, don’t try to solve the whole puzzle. Just write something.
That ended up being one of the biggest lessons I took from writing this book. The smallest idea you have, just start writing it. Don’t worry about how it fits. Don’t worry about structure or editing or whether it makes sense yet.
Because honestly—starting is the hardest part.
So, that’s what I did. I wrote Reed Ashland alone in his apartment, having a paranormal experience. And that became the first true Reed chapter in the book.
Reed is isolated and drinking. He’s already someone you’re not sure you can trust. And then something happens. Something that could be real, or could be in his head. You don’t know yet and neither does he.
That’s where the Elsewhere Fold started to take shape. Not as some fully mapped-out concept, but as a feeling. A place that exists just outside of where we are. Something you can slip into without realizing it.
Once I had that, I was off and running and I loved it.
That one chapter, before I edited it down, was probably close to 8,000 words by itself. What started as “I don’t know how to introduce this character” turned into me just dumping everything I had onto the page.
I had to cut it down. And it took a lot of passes. But that’s when I knew I had something. From there, the structure of the book really revealed itself.
The first half became a split between the two leads. Maria, in the real world, working a case that keeps getting stranger. Reed, drifting through something that feels like a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe something else entirely. Two tracks, running parallel. Not connected… yet.
Honestly, the best way I can describe Reed’s side of the story in that first half is almost like Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is quite stable. Nothing fully makes sense. And you get the impression that maybe this is all in Reed’s head or does Reed himself even really exist?
Then the next hurdle—at some point, I knew I had to bring them together. And this is where the book finally locked into place.
Originally, the idea was simple. Two investigators from different worlds crossing paths on the same case. That was the early concept. The Mulder and Marlowe idea. But that version didn’t feel right anymore.
Reed wasn’t an investigator, he was an academic. A philosophy professor dealing with grief, addiction, and a mind that might be unraveling.
So, if he’s not part of the investigation…
Then what is he?
And the answer hit me almost instantly. He’s a suspect.
That was it. That was the last piece. The moment I realized Reed should be brought into the story not as a partner, but as someone Maria is investigating, everything clicked into place.
And once I had that, the book basically wrote itself.
The first full draft came in at around 47,000 words. At the time, I thought that was fine. It felt like a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.
What I didn’t realize yet was that I had written something that lived in a weird gray area. Too long to really be a novella. Too short to be considered a full novel, especially in the genre I was working in. I didn’t know that yet.
So, I queried it. I sent it out to around 50 to 55 literary agents and I got nothing but rejections. Which, looking back, makes perfect sense.
Because as I started doing more research, I realized something pretty quickly: the book needed to be longer. I realized that I had queried something most agents probably wouldn’t even consider based on length alone.
And that hit me hard, so I quit. Again. For the second time. I remember thinking, that’s it. The book’s done. I can’t add to it. It is what it is.
But a couple days passed, like it always seemed to in this process, and I came back to it. Not with some big plan. Just… I’ll read it again. That’s all it was supposed to be.
I did some light edits to the 47,000 words I had. Nothing major, just smoothing things out. At that point I had around 37 or 38 chapters, and I was just trying to get a feel for the flow of it.
And then something happened.
I thought of a new opening chapter.
So, I wrote it. Maybe 700 or 800 words and slotted it in at the beginning.
Then I read a couple more chapters, and I had another thought. There could be something here. So, I added another chapter. And then another. And before I even realized what was happening, I wasn’t “lightly editing” anymore. I was deep in a rewrite.
That became Draft Two. And when I finished, it was around 86,000 words. I had nearly doubled the book. And none of it felt forced.
That was the thing that shocked me the most. It didn’t feel like filler, it felt like I had finally given the story the space it needed to breathe. I added around 12 or 13 new chapters, expanded several others, and everything just… clicked into place. It ended up being 51 chapters, which is where it sits now in its final version.
There was one chapter in particular, Chapter 16, that became what I always call my “Episode 8.” If you know Twin Peaks: The Return, you know exactly what I mean. If you don’t… that’s a whole separate rabbit hole.
But that chapter became this surreal centerpiece. Reed in the Elsewhere Fold, pushed to its absolute limit. I think I tripled or even quadrupled the length of that chapter from the original draft. At one point it was pushing 10,000 words by itself. Which, honestly, is too long for a single chapter. But at that stage, I didn’t care. I had a true full length novel now.
And I started thinking about querying again.
But during all of this, I had been doing a ton of research. Not just about writing, but about publishing. How it works and what the paths are. The more I learned, the more I started to question whether traditional publishing was even what I wanted.
Nothing against it. It’s the dream for a lot of writers. But for me…
I had already waited 30 years to finally sit down and write a novel.
And now I was looking at a process where maybe, if I was lucky, I had a 1% chance of getting an agent. Then more waiting. Then maybe a publisher. More waiting several more years if even getting in at all.
I’m too impatient for that. That’s just the truth. So, I made the decision. I was going to self-publish. And that’s when I quit again.
Because once I made that decision, I realized what it actually meant: Editing. Proofreading. Formatting. Cover design. Uploading. Metadata. Everything.
And I remember thinking, I have to go through 86,000 words… line by line?
No.
Hell to the no.
But, again, a few days passed and I came back. It was the same pattern all over again—let’s just do Chapter 1.
That was the deal I made with myself.
And I ended up doing three chapters that day.
Took a break. Came back. Did a few more. Before I knew it, I was 10 chapters in. Then halfway. Then I was fully committed again. Because that’s what kept happening throughout this entire process.
I’d quit and step away and come back cautiously.
When I look back, what I realized was that once I stopped thinking about editing and revising 86,000 words and started thinking of editing just 1,000 or maybe 2,000 words at a time, I felt the motivation kick back in. And just like the beginning—starting is the hard part.
Just get moving and eventually everything falls into place before you know it. Most things in life are that way.
That pass brought the book down from 86,000 to about 82,000 words. That was Draft Three.
Then I learned more about self-publishing. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. IngramSpark. Formatting tools. All of it.
Formatting, in particular, seemed like a nightmare until I found Reedsy Studio, which I still swear by. There are other tools like Atticus, but at the time I was trying to keep costs down.
The one place I knew I was going to spend money was the cover. That really mattered to me. Everything else, I was determined to figure out myself.
Once I committed to self-publishing, something shifted again.
I got obsessive. In a good way. I went through the book again. And again. And again. 82,000 dropped to 80,000. Then to 78,000. Each pass cleaner than the last. Because now I could see it, I could see the finish line. This wasn’t just an experiment anymore. This was something that was going to exist in the world. And I wanted it to be right.
Then came one of the most important moments in the entire process. I sent the manuscript to an author friend because I thought it was ready for ARC reads. She read two chapters and said, “No. This is a beta read.”
That’s when I knew I wasn’t done. Her feedback was invaluable but also a gut punch.
The biggest thing she pointed out was my overuse of similes. I was too descriptive. I was over-explaining. Trying too hard to paint every detail instead of letting the reader meet me halfway.
At first, I pushed back internally.
She just doesn’t get my style.
And then I had a moment of clarity.
What style? I’ve never done this before.
What was really going on was this—I just didn’t want to have to go through it one more time. But, I wanted to do this right. So, I listened. I dove back in again.
This became what I literally labeled on my computer as the “Simile Draft.”
I used search and find for certain words and phrases that’d help me identify similes: “like,” “as if,” “as though.” And when I did that…
The manuscript lit up like a damn Christmas tree. 😂🤦♂️
It was humbling, but I got 78,000 down to about 73,000. And the difference was massive.
I sent it back to her and this time, she said it read really well. That was one of the best feelings in the entire process.
But I still wasn’t done.
As the cover came together, I needed final page counts for formatting. That meant one more pass.
Then another for good measure. Small tweaks. Tightening language. Cleaning edges.
73,000 became 72,000.
At that point, I stopped counting drafts.
It was just… the book. Then the cover came in and everything started becoming real.
I worked through the process of uploading to Amazon and IngramSpark, figuring out templates, formatting, approvals. All the backend stuff that no one tells you about until you’re in it. I got the proofs and now…
Here we are. Release day is just a few days away.
I wrote a freaking full-length novel. 😁🎉✨
Picking up where I left off, I had my two lead characters, and I had the case. At the time, I was calling it The Two Marys.
That was the working title, and everything I was doing early on was centered around the investigation. I always knew I wanted the book to start grounded: detectives, casework, interviews, evidence. Something that felt real before anything else crept in. So that’s where I lived for a while.
Most of what I was writing early on were scenes with Maria Voss and Captain Bryans working the case. Going through each Mary Johnson, piece by piece, and as I wrote those, the details started getting stranger. Not wildly supernatural right away, but just enough to make Maria start to feel like something wasn’t adding up. That was the tone I wanted. Not chaos, just… unease.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped and realized something. I had written five chapters of Maria and nothing for Reed.
Which is funny, because when I first started this whole thing, Reed was the only character I could think of. But once I actually sat down and started writing, I got locked into Maria’s perspective. That’s just how it went.
And then I hit a wall. How do I even introduce Reed into this? That was one of the hardest parts of the entire process.
The case was working. The investigation was moving. But Reed existed in a completely different space, and I couldn’t figure out how to bring him in without it feeling forced. So, I went back to what got the story going for me in the first place—Inland Empire.
That same idea again: don’t overthink it, don’t try to solve the whole puzzle. Just write something.
That ended up being one of the biggest lessons I took from writing this book. The smallest idea you have, just start writing it. Don’t worry about how it fits. Don’t worry about structure or editing or whether it makes sense yet.
Because honestly—starting is the hardest part.
So, that’s what I did. I wrote Reed Ashland alone in his apartment, having a paranormal experience. And that became the first true Reed chapter in the book.
Reed is isolated and drinking. He’s already someone you’re not sure you can trust. And then something happens. Something that could be real, or could be in his head. You don’t know yet and neither does he.
That’s where the Elsewhere Fold started to take shape. Not as some fully mapped-out concept, but as a feeling. A place that exists just outside of where we are. Something you can slip into without realizing it.
Once I had that, I was off and running and I loved it.
That one chapter, before I edited it down, was probably close to 8,000 words by itself. What started as “I don’t know how to introduce this character” turned into me just dumping everything I had onto the page.
I had to cut it down. And it took a lot of passes. But that’s when I knew I had something. From there, the structure of the book really revealed itself.
The first half became a split between the two leads. Maria, in the real world, working a case that keeps getting stranger. Reed, drifting through something that feels like a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe something else entirely. Two tracks, running parallel. Not connected… yet.
Honestly, the best way I can describe Reed’s side of the story in that first half is almost like Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is quite stable. Nothing fully makes sense. And you get the impression that maybe this is all in Reed’s head or does Reed himself even really exist?
Then the next hurdle—at some point, I knew I had to bring them together. And this is where the book finally locked into place.
Originally, the idea was simple. Two investigators from different worlds crossing paths on the same case. That was the early concept. The Mulder and Marlowe idea. But that version didn’t feel right anymore.
Reed wasn’t an investigator, he was an academic. A philosophy professor dealing with grief, addiction, and a mind that might be unraveling.
So, if he’s not part of the investigation…
Then what is he?
And the answer hit me almost instantly. He’s a suspect.
That was it. That was the last piece. The moment I realized Reed should be brought into the story not as a partner, but as someone Maria is investigating, everything clicked into place.
And once I had that, the book basically wrote itself.
The first full draft came in at around 47,000 words. At the time, I thought that was fine. It felt like a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.
What I didn’t realize yet was that I had written something that lived in a weird gray area. Too long to really be a novella. Too short to be considered a full novel, especially in the genre I was working in. I didn’t know that yet.
So, I queried it. I sent it out to around 50 to 55 literary agents and I got nothing but rejections. Which, looking back, makes perfect sense.
Because as I started doing more research, I realized something pretty quickly: the book needed to be longer. I realized that I had queried something most agents probably wouldn’t even consider based on length alone.
And that hit me hard, so I quit. Again. For the second time. I remember thinking, that’s it. The book’s done. I can’t add to it. It is what it is.
But a couple days passed, like it always seemed to in this process, and I came back to it. Not with some big plan. Just… I’ll read it again. That’s all it was supposed to be.
I did some light edits to the 47,000 words I had. Nothing major, just smoothing things out. At that point I had around 37 or 38 chapters, and I was just trying to get a feel for the flow of it.
And then something happened.
I thought of a new opening chapter.
So, I wrote it. Maybe 700 or 800 words and slotted it in at the beginning.
Then I read a couple more chapters, and I had another thought. There could be something here. So, I added another chapter. And then another. And before I even realized what was happening, I wasn’t “lightly editing” anymore. I was deep in a rewrite.
That became Draft Two. And when I finished, it was around 86,000 words. I had nearly doubled the book. And none of it felt forced.
That was the thing that shocked me the most. It didn’t feel like filler, it felt like I had finally given the story the space it needed to breathe. I added around 12 or 13 new chapters, expanded several others, and everything just… clicked into place. It ended up being 51 chapters, which is where it sits now in its final version.
There was one chapter in particular, Chapter 16, that became what I always call my “Episode 8.” If you know Twin Peaks: The Return, you know exactly what I mean. If you don’t… that’s a whole separate rabbit hole.
But that chapter became this surreal centerpiece. Reed in the Elsewhere Fold, pushed to its absolute limit. I think I tripled or even quadrupled the length of that chapter from the original draft. At one point it was pushing 10,000 words by itself. Which, honestly, is too long for a single chapter. But at that stage, I didn’t care. I had a true full length novel now.
And I started thinking about querying again.
But during all of this, I had been doing a ton of research. Not just about writing, but about publishing. How it works and what the paths are. The more I learned, the more I started to question whether traditional publishing was even what I wanted.
Nothing against it. It’s the dream for a lot of writers. But for me…
I had already waited 30 years to finally sit down and write a novel.
And now I was looking at a process where maybe, if I was lucky, I had a 1% chance of getting an agent. Then more waiting. Then maybe a publisher. More waiting several more years if even getting in at all.
I’m too impatient for that. That’s just the truth. So, I made the decision. I was going to self-publish. And that’s when I quit again.
Because once I made that decision, I realized what it actually meant: Editing. Proofreading. Formatting. Cover design. Uploading. Metadata. Everything.
And I remember thinking, I have to go through 86,000 words… line by line?
No.
Hell to the no.
But, again, a few days passed and I came back. It was the same pattern all over again—let’s just do Chapter 1.
That was the deal I made with myself.
And I ended up doing three chapters that day.
Took a break. Came back. Did a few more. Before I knew it, I was 10 chapters in. Then halfway. Then I was fully committed again. Because that’s what kept happening throughout this entire process.
I’d quit and step away and come back cautiously.
When I look back, what I realized was that once I stopped thinking about editing and revising 86,000 words and started thinking of editing just 1,000 or maybe 2,000 words at a time, I felt the motivation kick back in. And just like the beginning—starting is the hard part.
Just get moving and eventually everything falls into place before you know it. Most things in life are that way.
That pass brought the book down from 86,000 to about 82,000 words. That was Draft Three.
Then I learned more about self-publishing. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. IngramSpark. Formatting tools. All of it.
Formatting, in particular, seemed like a nightmare until I found Reedsy Studio, which I still swear by. There are other tools like Atticus, but at the time I was trying to keep costs down.
The one place I knew I was going to spend money was the cover. That really mattered to me. Everything else, I was determined to figure out myself.
Once I committed to self-publishing, something shifted again.
I got obsessive. In a good way. I went through the book again. And again. And again. 82,000 dropped to 80,000. Then to 78,000. Each pass cleaner than the last. Because now I could see it, I could see the finish line. This wasn’t just an experiment anymore. This was something that was going to exist in the world. And I wanted it to be right.
Then came one of the most important moments in the entire process. I sent the manuscript to an author friend because I thought it was ready for ARC reads. She read two chapters and said, “No. This is a beta read.”
That’s when I knew I wasn’t done. Her feedback was invaluable but also a gut punch.
The biggest thing she pointed out was my overuse of similes. I was too descriptive. I was over-explaining. Trying too hard to paint every detail instead of letting the reader meet me halfway.
At first, I pushed back internally.
She just doesn’t get my style.
And then I had a moment of clarity.
What style? I’ve never done this before.
What was really going on was this—I just didn’t want to have to go through it one more time. But, I wanted to do this right. So, I listened. I dove back in again.
This became what I literally labeled on my computer as the “Simile Draft.”
I used search and find for certain words and phrases that’d help me identify similes: “like,” “as if,” “as though.” And when I did that…
The manuscript lit up like a damn Christmas tree. 😂🤦♂️
It was humbling, but I got 78,000 down to about 73,000. And the difference was massive.
I sent it back to her and this time, she said it read really well. That was one of the best feelings in the entire process.
But I still wasn’t done.
As the cover came together, I needed final page counts for formatting. That meant one more pass.
Then another for good measure. Small tweaks. Tightening language. Cleaning edges.
73,000 became 72,000.
At that point, I stopped counting drafts.
It was just… the book. Then the cover came in and everything started becoming real.
I worked through the process of uploading to Amazon and IngramSpark, figuring out templates, formatting, approvals. All the backend stuff that no one tells you about until you’re in it. I got the proofs and now…
Here we are. Release day is just a few days away.
I wrote a freaking full-length novel. 😁🎉✨
April 15, 2026
Where Reflections in the Dark Began
Reflections in the Dark
I’ve been writing, in some form or another, since I was about nine years old.
It started with Goosebumps. Those books hit me at exactly the right time. They made me want to write spooky stories of my own, and I never really stopped.
Not continuously. Life happens. But over the years, I wrote in bursts. Short stories, screenplays, journals, random ideas. The desire was always there. I just had never written a novel.
When I finally decided to try, the hardest question wasn’t how to write one. It was what to write.
So I went back to what inspired me.
Two of the biggest influences were Twin Peaks and The X-Files. That mix of investigation and something just outside reality always stuck with me. But even earlier than that, I thought about watching Unsolved Mysteries as a kid. The tone, the music, the feeling that something real but unexplained was out there.
That’s where the core idea started to take shape.
I wanted two characters who were opposites.
One grounded. A detective rooted in reality. The other… not so much. Someone who believes in things they probably shouldn’t. Someone you don’t fully trust at first, but who might understand more than anyone else.
That dynamic became the backbone of the story.
Eventually, those characters became Maria Voss and Reed Ashland.
The story itself started in an unusual way. Instead of writing a full outline, I began with scenes. Small pieces. Moments that didn’t fully connect yet, but carried the tone I was chasing. Over time, those pieces started to come together.
At first, they weren’t very good. That was honestly the closest I came to stopping.
But instead of quitting, I pulled back and focused on the characters. Who they were, what they had been through, and how they would react to something that didn’t make sense.
Once that clicked, everything else followed.
The final piece was the case itself. And that came from something that stuck with me for years. A real story about two people with the same name, dying under nearly identical circumstances, with no clear connection between them.
That idea became the foundation.
A mystery that feels grounded at first… and then slowly starts to unravel.
And once I had that, along with Maria and Reed, I finally started writing for real.
Reflections in the Dark releases April 21.
I’ve been writing, in some form or another, since I was about nine years old.
It started with Goosebumps. Those books hit me at exactly the right time. They made me want to write spooky stories of my own, and I never really stopped.
Not continuously. Life happens. But over the years, I wrote in bursts. Short stories, screenplays, journals, random ideas. The desire was always there. I just had never written a novel.
When I finally decided to try, the hardest question wasn’t how to write one. It was what to write.
So I went back to what inspired me.
Two of the biggest influences were Twin Peaks and The X-Files. That mix of investigation and something just outside reality always stuck with me. But even earlier than that, I thought about watching Unsolved Mysteries as a kid. The tone, the music, the feeling that something real but unexplained was out there.
That’s where the core idea started to take shape.
I wanted two characters who were opposites.
One grounded. A detective rooted in reality. The other… not so much. Someone who believes in things they probably shouldn’t. Someone you don’t fully trust at first, but who might understand more than anyone else.
That dynamic became the backbone of the story.
Eventually, those characters became Maria Voss and Reed Ashland.
The story itself started in an unusual way. Instead of writing a full outline, I began with scenes. Small pieces. Moments that didn’t fully connect yet, but carried the tone I was chasing. Over time, those pieces started to come together.
At first, they weren’t very good. That was honestly the closest I came to stopping.
But instead of quitting, I pulled back and focused on the characters. Who they were, what they had been through, and how they would react to something that didn’t make sense.
Once that clicked, everything else followed.
The final piece was the case itself. And that came from something that stuck with me for years. A real story about two people with the same name, dying under nearly identical circumstances, with no clear connection between them.
That idea became the foundation.
A mystery that feels grounded at first… and then slowly starts to unravel.
And once I had that, along with Maria and Reed, I finally started writing for real.
Reflections in the Dark releases April 21.
The Story Behind Reflections in the Dark
Reflections in the Dark
What inspired Reflections in the Dark?
For me, it didn’t start with a plot or a character. It started with a moment.
I remember sitting at my desk at work, scrolling through my phone, and seeing the news that David Lynch had passed away. It wasn’t something I expected to hit me the way it did, but it stuck with me. Not because I felt like I knew him personally, but because very few artists have ever affected me the way his work did.
His films always left something behind. Not just stories, but images and feelings that lingered. Something unsettling, something you couldn’t fully explain, but couldn’t shake either. That sense of something being just slightly off… that’s what always drew me in.
And it made me realize something I had been avoiding for a long time.
I had spent years writing privately. Since I was a kid, really. Always imagining, always creating, but never putting anything out into the world. It was always just… mine.
And seeing that someone who created that kind of work was gone, and that there would be no more of it, made me ask myself a simple question:
How much of what’s in my head is never going to exist outside of it?
That was the turning point.
Not when I first had the idea for the book. Not when I started outlining. But right there, in that moment.
Because I realized that I didn’t want to keep sitting on it. I didn’t want to keep everything locked away. I wanted to actually do it.
So I did.
I wrote a story that leans into the kinds of things that always stayed with me. A mystery that feels slightly unreal. A world where things don’t quite behave the way they should. Something more about atmosphere and feeling than clear answers.
Not an attempt to imitate, because you can’t imitate something like that. But an attempt to capture that same sense of something lingering beneath the surface.
Whether people connect with it or not, whether they understand it or interpret it in completely different ways, it exists now. It’s out there.
And that, more than anything, is what matters to me.
Reflections in the Dark releases April 21.
What inspired Reflections in the Dark?
For me, it didn’t start with a plot or a character. It started with a moment.
I remember sitting at my desk at work, scrolling through my phone, and seeing the news that David Lynch had passed away. It wasn’t something I expected to hit me the way it did, but it stuck with me. Not because I felt like I knew him personally, but because very few artists have ever affected me the way his work did.
His films always left something behind. Not just stories, but images and feelings that lingered. Something unsettling, something you couldn’t fully explain, but couldn’t shake either. That sense of something being just slightly off… that’s what always drew me in.
And it made me realize something I had been avoiding for a long time.
I had spent years writing privately. Since I was a kid, really. Always imagining, always creating, but never putting anything out into the world. It was always just… mine.
And seeing that someone who created that kind of work was gone, and that there would be no more of it, made me ask myself a simple question:
How much of what’s in my head is never going to exist outside of it?
That was the turning point.
Not when I first had the idea for the book. Not when I started outlining. But right there, in that moment.
Because I realized that I didn’t want to keep sitting on it. I didn’t want to keep everything locked away. I wanted to actually do it.
So I did.
I wrote a story that leans into the kinds of things that always stayed with me. A mystery that feels slightly unreal. A world where things don’t quite behave the way they should. Something more about atmosphere and feeling than clear answers.
Not an attempt to imitate, because you can’t imitate something like that. But an attempt to capture that same sense of something lingering beneath the surface.
Whether people connect with it or not, whether they understand it or interpret it in completely different ways, it exists now. It’s out there.
And that, more than anything, is what matters to me.
Reflections in the Dark releases April 21.
