There’s something unsettling about discovering that the stories you’ve been avoiding are the ones you’re meant to tell.

For decades, horror lived in me like a secret language I refused to speak fluently. I could appreciate its literature—Dracula, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works. I could lose myself in Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic voice, Christopher Lee’s Gothic grandeur. But writing it? That required a courage I didn’t possess.

I could excavate family trauma with archaeological precision, weave Cold War espionage through fog-shrouded landscapes, thread the supernatural into historical narratives without flinching. But horror—true horror, the kind that follows you into sleep—demanded complete surrender to the deepest, most undefended places in the human psyche.

The Cartography of Exile

Last September, I packed twenty years of Appalachian silence into suitcases and carried them across an ocean to Qatar. Under foreign stars, surrounded by the desert’s relentless clarity, I discovered a paradox: sometimes you have to become geographically displaced to become emotionally rooted.

It was there—where the call to prayer rose like an ancient incantation—that Night of the Moon Witch began pouring out of me like something dammed up for decades. A gothic Appalachian tale about women bound by blood magic and family betrayal, where poetry carries curses and love stories turn lethal.

I thought I was finally writing fiction. It turned out I was performing an exorcism.

The Architecture of Damaged Families

There’s a particular architecture to wounded families—the way silence becomes load-bearing, how unspoken truths hold up entire emotional structures. In mine, each generation developed its own relationship with inherited wounds: some women turned their pain into religion, others built elaborate cathedrals of denial around theirs. What they all shared was the understanding that certain stories were too dangerous to tell, too essential to forget.

The Bramwell family in my novel carries that same weight—powerful, cursed, divided by blood and bound by secrets that make their own weather systems.

The landscape mirrors this emotional topography: mountains rising like ancient guardians, their faces carved into something almost human—watchful, knowing. A town perched like a jewelry box someone forgot to close. The Montague Hotel presiding over manicured gardens, windows reflecting clouds that pause for the view.

But beneath that postcard prettiness lies something older, more restless. Hot springs bubble up from honeycomb caverns, carrying the sulfur scent of deeper places. The mineral pools steam even in summer, their waters the color of old pennies, warm as blood.

It’s a place where generational trauma becomes a monster.

This is where I’ve finally found courage to set my characters loose—not in some safely distant past, but in a present-day landscape where you could stumble into the story yourself.

What I’ve Learned

Some stories require the most remote telling to become intimate. The fears I couldn’t name while living inside them became writeable once I’d carried them far enough away to see their shapes. Exile taught me that displacement isn’t always loss—sometimes it’s the only way to gain perspective necessary for real homecoming.

Horror isn’t about creating fear—it’s about giving shape to the fears that already live in us, making them visible enough to be faced.

And now that story exists in the world. Night of the Moon Witch is available now, and I find myself both terrified and desperate for readers to experience what poured out of me in that Qatari desert. I’m genuinely curious whether it will haunt you the way it’s haunted me.

An Invitation Across Waters

I’m building something new now, a space I call Gothic Tales and Desert Revelations where I explore the cartography of exile and return, the archaeology of family myths, the peculiar magic that happens when distance finally lets us see home clearly. It lives on Substack, where I share essays, fiction, and Desert Dispatches from this strange life caught between Virginia mountains and Qatari desert.

If you’ve been following my work here at Cold, I hope you’ll join me there for this next chapter. While Cold isn’t going anywhere, this new territory requires different tools, different exploration. It also just offers you all…more.

And if you do join me, you’ll get access to something special: a prequel short story that offers a taste of the Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles universe. Consider it a bridge between the familiar territories we’ve explored together and the darker, more mythic landscapes I’ve finally scraped up the courage to inhabit.