The Glass Inkwell

If you've clicked on this, congratulations — you already understand at some instinctive level that cozy gothic mystery is a genre unto itself. You've probably been living in it for a while without quite having a name for what you love about it. Let me try to name it. The Cozy Part Cozy mystery has a reputation for gentle stakes, and that reputation is — partially deserved. The body count is real but the blood is minimal. The detective is an amateur. The community is small and

I have read approximately one thousand fantasy romances where the heroine's primary superpower is being the chosen one and being rescued. I understand the appeal. I do. There's something deeply comforting about the idea that someone will swoop in and handle things. (Especially on the weeks when I can barely handle my inbox.) But as a reader, I noticed that the rescue narrative started to feel like a transaction. She's beautiful and in trouble. He's powerful and drawn to her.

Cressida Vale has opinions. She has been given the blog. This was either a brilliant idea or a catastrophic one — possibly both.

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 darknes

On editing Vale & Stone Book 2 and what waits in the shadows of a town I thought I knew There's a version of Blackvale that most people never see. Not because it's hidden, exactly. More because it requires a certain willingness — to stay past closing time, to take the long way home, to linger in the kind of light that turns ordinary storefronts into something else entirely. Something older. Something that breathes. I've been deep in the editing trenches of Vale & Stone Book 2

I’ve long accepted that my creative process looks less like a calm, candlelit genius-at-work montage and more like a crow collecting shiny objects during a caffeine high. My brainstorming notes—whether in Notion or scattered through my ever-growing family of notebooks—read like a crime scene of half-thoughts, crossed-out side quests, multiple timelines arguing in the margins, and at least one doodle of a dragon wearing sunglasses. And yet… somehow, out of this chaos, a story

If you give a writer a summer festival—all sunshine and celebration and communal joy—they will inevitably imagine someone dying there. I don't make the rules. I just follow them with enthusiasm and a notebook. (Don't blame me. Blame the vibes. Blame the fact that nothing says "prime murder opportunity" quite like a crowded event where everyone's drinking cider and pretending to like their neighbors while secretly nursing decades-old grudges.) The Midsummer Feast & Fair in Mur

There's something about island stories that hits differently. Maybe it's the promise of turquoise water lapping against white sand, or the way salt air seems to strip away everything unnecessary until you're left with just yourself and what you actually want. Maybe it's the permission that distance gives us—to be someone different, someone braver, someone who says yes to things we'd never consider back home where the bills are waiting and responsibilities have our phone numb

A TED Talk Presented Live From Inside a Pillow Fort Growing up, I thought writers lived in cabins with typewriters. You know the ones. Woodsmoke. Snow falling gently outside. A single mug of coffee that somehow stayed hot for hours. Turns out writers mostly live in Google Docs and Notion, with bad posture, three half-finished drinks, and a browser tab open just in case we need to google something unhinged like “how long can a person survive on an alien moon without oxygen.”

There’s this couple I watch on YouTube—yes, a sentence that still feels vaguely ridiculous to say out loud. Once upon a time we lived in a world before YouTube existed. (I don’t remember those days clearly, because my memory enjoys playing hide-and-seek, but I’m told they definitely happened.) Anyway. This couple lived in an RV when I first found them during my vanlife-curious era, and eventually they traded wheels for a sailboat. Something about that shift—taking your entire