When I’m writing a character, good or bad, I basically put myself in their headspace: what would this character do and allow? What are their boundaries? And then I write as if I’m them. Any moral compass that might be mine is turned off; it’s about getting the truth of the character on the page, whether they’re likable or not. It’s about not flinching at anything they do, because you need to transmit to the reader that “yes, this person absolutely would do this” if you want them to believe your story and follow you along. My main aim is to make all my characters relatable in some way.

Grief is often very lonely, and I really leaned into that as hard as I could. I think most people have had the experience of mourning something that was “too small” to mourn, or grieved for something “too hard” or “the wrong way,” and that can be really alienating. So, uh, I made some characters who were grieving people everyone else said didn’t even exist.

I’ve written several stories that are grounded in the academic world, either through plot or narration or setting. The contemporary idea of school is inherently a chaos unto itself, and there’s so much mystery in knowledge, so much potential for the unknown, the arcane, and the incomprehensible to rear their heads in learning, that the academic world lends itself to horror.