The Kind of Dark I Can Live In

There's a thing I say when people look at my watchlist and squint. You'll write an entire fantasy novel with blood and betrayal and ancient monsters who eat grief for breakfast, but you won't watch Law & Order?

And the answer is: correct. Absolutely not. Not even the reruns.

I've thought about this more than I probably should have (it was a Tuesday, I had coffee, I was procrastinating on a chapter—you know how it goes). And what I landed on is this: it's not about the darkness itself. It's about what the darkness is for.

CBS’ Grimm is, on the surface, a cop show. But it's also a mythology. Every monster has a history, a culture, a reason it exists in the world. Nick Burkhardt doesn't just fight creatures—he learns them. He builds a library of understanding. The violence in that show is tangled up in lineage, in meaning, in the long slow question of what it means to be something other than human in a world that doesn't know you exist.

That's a story I can live inside.

Law & Order is a procedural. It is very good at being a procedural. But the violence there is real-world adjacent in a way that doesn't give me anywhere to put it. There's no myth. No creature logic. No magic that reframes the horror into something I can examine from a safer angle. It's just... the news, with better lighting.

Here's the thing I've realized about my own comfort with fictional darkness: I need it to have architecture.

When a story hurts, I want to understand why the hurt is there. Is it building something? Revealing something? Is the darkness load-bearing—holding up a theme, a character arc, a truth about the human condition? Or is it just... atmosphere? Just weight for weight's sake?

I'm not fragile about difficult content. I write it. I love stories that go to the hard places, that don't flinch when a character breaks or the world reveals itself to be crueler than expected. But I need a hand extended in the dark. Not to pull me out of it—just to say I put this here on purpose. Follow me.

That's what fantasy and myth and speculative fiction give me. They say: yes, this is dark, and the darkness means something. The rules of the world hold. The monsters have names. The grief has a shape you can trace with your finger.

That's why I can watch a Wesen tear someone apart in a Portland back alley and feel... okay. Not because it's not violent. But because the violence lives inside a world I understand, where the rules are different and the reasons are layered and the story is clearly going somewhere.

The universe handed me a sign about what kind of writer I am. I sighed at it, then accepted.

I write darkness that has purpose. Monsters that carry meaning. Violence that serves the story's spine, not just its aesthetics. Because if you're going to take readers somewhere difficult, you owe them a map back—or at least a reason to stay lost.

That's not softness. That's craft.

Until next time,

Jade