And then I kept pulling on it and it didn’t want to stay comfortable.

In the Zoroastrian tradition that inspired the Emari Chronicles, the Chinvat Bridge is where every soul goes after death. The righteous find it wide and easy. The wicked find it as narrow as a razor’s edge. Rashnu stands on it with his scales and there is no appealing the outcome. It’s not a metaphor. It’s cosmology, the literal architecture of what happens when you die, and the more I sat with it the more I kept thinking about what it would mean if it was also a room, something you could walk into while you were still alive and put your hands on the railing.

That’s how the Forgotten Temple happened. The Chinvat Bridge in the Emari Chronicles is a physical place, hidden inside the Forgotten Temple, a ruin so ancient it predates any living history, buried deep in a cave network at the base of the mountains, with no maps to mark it and no records to name it. Most people in Emari treat it the way Yasher does when he first sees it, as myth, as the kind of thing that is true without being real.

“The bridge souls cross to meet Rashnu,” he murmured, repeating her earlier words as though trying to anchor them in reality. “I thought it was just a story.” Farah turned to him, her voice trembling. “It’s not just a story. This is… this is where the dead are judged. This bridge… it’s not meant for the living.”

It is not meant for the living. That was the constraint I gave myself when I built it, and it turned out to have consequences I didn’t fully anticipate, because if you make sacred ground into a physical place you have to think about what happens when living people stand on something that wasn’t designed for them. The bridge falls apart around Farah and Yasher the entire time they’re on it — the stone pulses with its own inner light, the water below glows bluish-white, the carvings shift under the torchlight. It’s gorgeous and it is also actively collapsing, sections crumbling into the dark while they’re still crossing it, a gap appearing that they have to jump, Yasher getting hurt badly enough that Farah has to leave him and cross the rest of it alone.

The Chinvat Bridge stretched ahead, a translucent path of light suspended above an endless chasm that seemed to swallow sound and thought alike. Behind her, the edges of the mortal world faded into mist, separating her from everything familiar.

What she finds at the other end is Rashnu, and a choice he gives her, and a truth about what she was actually sent into the Forgotten Temple to retrieve. I’ll let Book 1 tell you that part.

What I will tell you is what’s on the other side of the bridge when you’ve been properly judged. The House of Song is where the righteous go, peace and rest and reunion with the divine, and the House of Lies is the other thing, reckoning in proportion to the harm you caused in life. In Emari’s burial rite, the Leaving, that ritual of water and cedar and burning saffron, exists to prepare someone for exactly this crossing. Death in Emari isn’t the end of the story. It’s the appointment you’ve been preparing for your whole life.

Farah knows all of this when she crosses the bridge alive, knows she’s somewhere she has no business being while her heart is still beating. She goes anyway.

“I walked the Chinvat Bridge. The godly one.”

She says it to Yasher after, like she’s still not sure he’ll believe her, like she’s still not sure she believes it herself.

What Rashnu told her on the other side of that bridge is what Book 1 is built around. If you want to know what it cost her to cross it, the book is waiting.

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The figure who runs those scales is Rashnu. And y’all, the moment I read about him, I knew he wasn’t going to stay a minor angel in my world.

In the tradition that inspired Emari, Rashnu is one of many divine figures, important but not primary. I changed that. I made him the head of the pantheon, the balancer, the one everything else orbits. The reason is baked right into what he is. A being whose entire existence is the maintenance of equilibrium, who sees every path and weighs every deed, who doesn’t have favorites or make exceptions. That’s exactly the kind of being you want at the top of your cosmology when your story is fundamentally about what it costs to do the right thing.

It’s also the kind of being who would use a child as his voice and see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That child is Pari, and she’s one of my favorite characters in the whole series. She shows up in the first chapter of The Hand of Mashyana and grabs Farah by the hand. Farah is a trained soldier and a senior member of the Mashyana’s household. Pari is maybe eight years old, and she is completely unconcerned with that power difference.

“I am Pari. Rashnu wants me to help you not die quite so soon.”

She has been watching Farah for a while, actually. Rashnu has been showing her the paths Farah can take, the ones that end soon and the ones that don’t, and now she’s here to redirect things. When Farah pushes back and asks what could possibly be lost if she doesn’t follow a child through the city streets, Pari waves her free hand in exasperation.

“All the things.”

That’s what happens when the being doing the sending doesn’t weigh things by how they feel, only by what the scales require. Pari is the right instrument for the path. To Rashnu, that’s sufficient.

I also gave him the head of a white hawk, golden-eyed, with wings that fold behind him like something out of an illuminated manuscript. And I did that deliberately, because early in Book 1, that hawk keeps appearing. It shows up wounded on a windowsill while Farah and Yasher are mid-argument, its golden eyes flickering between them before it bursts off the sill and disappears into the sky.

“A harbinger,” Farah says, almost to herself.

“Looked more like an angry bird to me,” says Yasher.

He’s not entirely wrong. It is an angry bird. It’s also been leading them toward the Chinvat Bridge the whole time, and they don’t know that yet.

When Farah finally crosses the bridge inside the Forgotten Temple and the air shimmers ahead of her, she sees him for the first time.

“His form towered, nearly twelve feet tall, with the powerful body of a man, draped in robes of pristine white that shimmered as if woven from stardust. His face was that of a great white hawk, fierce yet wise, golden eyes gleaming with a depth that seemed to reach through time itself.”

“Farah,” the figure speaks, his voice soft yet resonant, like the hum of a distant drum. “You have crossed the threshold.”

He gives her a choice on that bridge. He tells her what each option will cost. He doesn’t tell her what to choose. That’s not what the scales are for.

If you want to know what she picks, the book is waiting.

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My kid Liz introduced me to The Amazing Devil in 2021 after discovering them through The Witcher. Joey Batey, who plays Jaskier, is one half of the duo. I added them to my regular playlists almost immediately because the stories they tell within their songs grabbed me in a way I hadn’t expected. There’s a theatrical quality to their folk that earns its emotion. Nothing feels cheap. And I kept coming back.

By October 2022, I was deep in one of my hyperfixation cycles with their discography. My family knows the signs. I find a band, I play them on repeat until something shakes loose, and then I surface again. It’s not the most relaxing process to live with, but it works.

I was prepping for NaNoWriMo. I’d been doing it for about twenty years at that point, and I was going through a Google Doc I keep full of story fragments. Sentences, images, half-premises that never quite found their story. I was looking for The Thing. The idea worth 50,000 words.

Nothing was grabbing me.

And then Inkpot Gods came on.

The song is a duet. Joey Batey’s voice carries one thread, Madeleine Hyland’s carries another, and they weave around each other the way two people do when they’re trying to hold something together and running out of road.

I won’t quote the whole thing here. Go listen. It’s worth the four minutes. But the line that stopped me was the one they repeat at the end, over and over, like a vow or a prayer or both at once.

Eleven words. And I had an image.

Two people on a bridge. A woman in a Persian cross-coat. A man, watching her go. Everything falling apart around them, and her having to leave him behind anyway.

I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know what world they lived in or why they were on that bridge or what it had cost them to get there. But the image was so specific and so insistent that I knew it was the thing I’d been looking for.

Farah arrived first, and she arrived fully. That coat, that bridge, that weight. Yasher came after, shaped in part by what the song already knew about him. The devotion in Joey’s verse, the vow to stay, the man trying to be equal to something enormous. The two of them together had the structure of a duet before I understood they were the duet.

The bridge resolved on its own, the way things do when you chase a story hard enough. The Chinvat Bridge, from Zoroastrian belief. The crossing point between worlds. My old History degree surfacing unbidden, crowding out whatever useful thing I’d meant to remember that day. But it was right. It was exactly right.

From there, the world opened up.

Here’s what I didn’t see until I was deep in the second draft. The song already knew things about the book that I hadn’t figured out yet.

Madeleine’s verse has Farah written into it before I knew who Farah was.

Farah hums. It’s her Talent, the way she calls metal and moves it and fights with it. The song has a line about trees waiting to hear what next you’ll hum. I had given her that detail before I understood what I was doing.

“I’m more than what my mum told me to be.” Behnaz raised her. Told her what she was, what she was for. Farah believed it for a long time. The first book is her learning that wasn’t the truth about her.

“To those gods I will speak bluntly. We’ve an accord.” She crosses the Chinvat Bridge alone and stands in front of a god and asks one thing. Is he alive? No preamble. And then she makes the choice, not the House of Song but the fight. That’s the accord.

And the bridge section, where the two voices separate and each one can hear the other but can’t quite reach them. “Where I’m going is for me and me alone.” Nobody crosses that bridge with her. That moment belongs to Farah.

I didn’t plan it. The song just knew.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to when people ask about my process. Music compresses what it takes a novel hundreds of pages to unfold. A three-minute song can hold an entire relationship, an entire impossible choice, in a form that gets into your body before your brain can argue with it. When a song stops me, really stops me, mid-whatever, staring at nothing, something in it knows something I don’t yet. My job is to chase it down and find out what.

There will always be a playlist.

Each book in The Emari Chronicles has one, and they’re not just background or mood boards. They map to characters, to turning points, to the emotional logic of the story. Best played on shuffle, because that’s how the story actually lives in my head. Not linear, but accumulating.

• The Hand of Mashyana
• The Veil of Takhsha

Inkpot Gods is on the Hand playlist. Obviously.

If you end up down a rabbit hole with The Amazing Devil afterward, that’s not an accident. And if you come back from that rabbit hole wanting to know what happened on the Chinvat Bridge, the books are waiting.

The Hand of Mashyana and The Veil of Takhsha are available now. The Emari Chronicles is a four-book Persian-inspired epic fantasy series. Start here.

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I’ve always written. That’s just the start. I’ve dabbled with writing groups, with Nanowrimo, and being the isolated writer for most of my life, picking up and putting it down as life would divert my attention. This year, I put my foot down and said I’m going to make this writing thing more than just a vacation from the rest of my life. It will be a large part of my life.

First Decision: From Writer to Author – Achievement Unlocked

While technically I’d decided the last time I’d started dipping my toe into the possible publication route to go indie and not traditional since I was placing my flag in the ground this time around, I reviewed whether I still wanted to take on a lot of the front-loading that is indie publishing instead of going the route of finding an agent and going the traditional publishing route. Because of my personality, skill set, and let’s be frank, lack of patience (along with my need to control as many things as possible), I’ve decided to stick with going the indie publishing route to move from “writer” and into “published author”.

Second Decision: Indie Publishing – Achievement Unlocked

I pump out A LOT of words in the fall, usually thanks to Nanowrimo. But given the last two years of Nano shitting the bed on making good choices, that wouldn’t be an option for me this year. (Full story here). I’ve seen a lot of different folks trying to organize Nanowrimo alternatives, but nothing was speaking to me. I happened to attend a free webinar put on by Alessandre Torre (one of the founders of InkersCon, which I’ve attended virtually over the last few years) where she talked about her small group BootCamp she was running in October/November, which would have your work reviewed by three different pro editors, along with direct access to her in open Q&As, and small groups of your peers in the same part of the author journey. I couldn’t hit “Buy Now” quick enough.

Third Decision: Writing Bootcamp – Achievement Unlocked

While we worked through all of the classwork with the Bootcamp, we hit “Publishing” and “Marketing”… and the question that I feel would haunt me if I didn’t make the right decision before I hit Publish came up. To go KDP or to go Wide? Before working through the coursework, I thought, oh, I can go KDP exclusive for ebook, and then wide on print. But the more I did the work, and then fell into a bit of a rabbit hole of opinions and experiments from indies who went before me, especially for fantasy series, the more I hit the decision wall. It only makes sense to start Wide for me. Like choosing indie vs. trad, it’ll be more work on the front end, but it’s the right choice for me.

Fourth Decision: Go Wide – Achievement Unlocked

Now, I’ve reached where my skill set comes in. Because going indie means I’m responsible for editors, marketing, and book cover. I’ve done many book covers and author sites thanks to my freelance business, but looking at the market and comp titles for my fantasy series, my first attempt was soulless. Pretty, but soulless. My personal style was directly in the way of the market expectations. As I was working through the standard “what’s missing” conversations with friends and family, my kid piped in with some really great points, even though their own commission work hadn’t treaded into book cover territory. I ended up working out a deal with them and they’re finishing up the cover as I type this.

Fifth Decision: Book Cover Design – Achievement Unlocked

Next, while I wait for the developmental editors’ feedback from the Bootcamp, I’m starting to gather interested parties to become my beta readers while I wrap up my edits (which if you’re following along on my socials, I just ripped out my entire Act 2 to rewrite it **cries**). While I’ve had lots of friends say “Sure, I’d love to read it” I wanted to put words into action, so I’ve created a Beta Reader Interest Form to keep it all official. I shared out that link to my newsletter, and I’ve already had a few folks sign up.

Sixth Decision: Beta Readers – Achievement Unlocked.

Up next: I’ll need to hire an editor, figure out if I’m going to format my work or hire it out, and so much more. The goal is the beginning of the year to publish The Hand of Mashyana, Book One of my Action-Adventure Fantasy Series. This decision list is really the tip of a scary but exciting adventure. I’ve been writing in some form online since 2003, so I’m going to try and keep up both the joys and the pains of this next experiment here.

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I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) since 2003. Twenty years, y’all. And here’s where I hang up my hat and say I won’t be participating any longer, thanks to their stance on using AI.

Listen, y’all – I work with AI, and have for years for the day job. I understand its uses and limitations and think it can be a helpful tool in many cases. I have one main stopping point when using AI, though.

I cannot abide by AI in the creative fields. That’s not where it belongs.

To be this completely tone-deaf (at best) by attempting to say that not supporting the use of AI in a creative field like writing. Chuck Wendig says it much more succinctly than I can:

Chuck really breaks down all of the ways that this use of generative AI in particular harms the creative fields in particular – go ahead and give it a read.

It really does hurt my heart to say goodbye to Nanowrimo, as it really did change me, allowed me to play in genres and worlds that I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do. I also WROTE, without care or letting in the inner editor, winning over half of the nanos that I participated in.

So long, Nanowrimo…. it was so good for so long.

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Why Nanowrimo?

Why do I do this? In part, to prove to myself that I can, but from another viewpoint, I tend to use Nano as my way of testing out my collection of random story ideas as a bit of a litmus test. If I can take a sentence or two that I’ve written down in a digital or analog journal and churn out 50,000 in 30 days, it seems to have legs to finish it.

Also, I love playing in new genres during Nano just to see if they interest me as a writer and not just as a reader.

Last year was my first real foray into Epic/Multi-POV Fantasy, and I adored it enough that I’m doing it again this year. Mind you, if you head over to my Goodreads profile I read a lot of it, but I don’t write it. I’ve never felt that I could write in this genre for a multitude of reasons, but I’m happy to say that I really, truly love writing it as much as I love reading it.

So what’s your process?

If you haven’t gotten the theme yet, I adore playing around during Nanowrimo with all kinds of things – ideas, genres, and processes. I’ve used just about every kind of published process out there during PrepTober (October prep for November’s writing).

This year I’m going back to the Beat Sheet I used last year, Take off Your Pants by Libbie Hawker. For someone who has been a self-described Plantster (mix of plotter and pantser) for most of my writing life, I tend to lean a little harder on the pantser mentality than I do plotting out things, so this beat sheet for outlining has been so great for me.

The thing I’ve found with this method of outlining is that it focuses on my favorite part of writing, the characters. I think that’s why I’ve struggled before with some beat sheets and outlines where the plot is the driver, while my lovely little imaginary friends, my characters, will always be my primary focus when I’m writing things.

So what’s happening this year?

I’m being a little bit of a rebel this year because I’m taking last year’s Nano novel, and I’m just starting over. There were some fabulous pieces in there, but I think I flip-flopped on what was important to the story itself, so I’m going to start it over. Not only am I going to be rewriting the book, but I have already begun percolating on making this an actual trilogy.

Book 1 (and more than likely the series) is currently named “The Hand of Mashyana” and I’ve been playing around with a little bit of a blurb.

In the enchanted realm of Emari, loyalty and trust are everything, and Farah has been raised to honor the Mashyana above all else. As a servant of the queen, she’s unwavering in her devotion, until the day she’s tasked with a mission that will change everything.

Yasher, a wily traveler and card shark from a distant northern kingdom, possesses a powerful relic—the Eye of Rashnu—a relic of untold significance. Unaware of its true power, he is thrust into Emari’s dangerous political intrigue.

When Farah’s path crosses with Yasher’s, their worlds collide in a realm where secrets are woven into the very fabric of humanity’s existence when a dark ambition that threatens Emari and its gods emerges. Farah must confront her allegiance, trust in new allies, and confront the realities of power and betrayal.

As the battle for the relics escalates and the fate of the gods hangs in the balance, Farah and Yasher must work together to unveil the Eye of Rashnu’s true purpose. In a world where loyalty can be a weapon and trust the greatest treasure, they face not only the sinister secrets, unlikely allies and enemies, and try to save the gods that abandoned them centuries ago.

Mind you, this is all subject to change as I write this month, but I’m really feeling it so far.

Want to keep up with my writing this month in particular? Hit me up on my socials to follow along.

Threads | Instagram

And if you’re participating in Nanowrimo this year, I’d love to be buddies!

Happy Nanowrimo to all who celebrate!

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Yeah, about that…

I worked solidly through my edits, and I started pushing toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

Then, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered. The pandemic got worse. Then George Floyd was murdered. The pandemic got worse. Then the election. The pandemic got worse. Then January 6. The pandemic got worse, and we decided we’d ignore it. Then, then, then.

I shut down. I stopped doing anything and everything outside of basic functional responsibilities. Family and work were all I could get myself out of bed to do. I started a new day job in the middle of 2021 as well, and every ounce of energy not expended to just get through the day was spent on trying to learn a new company and manage new people who were not used to having a manager who didn’t live in the same area as they did.

Opening up Scrivener caused me outright anxiety, let alone thinking about writing anything. I attempted to work on edits, even getting a new editor for Lens, but I just couldn’t seem to focus for more than short bursts.

That, my friends, is all to say, Depression sucks. Depression lies. Depression knocks you flat on your ass to where you don’t want to get up off the floor.

While I’m not ‘fixed’ yet (the joys of being bipolar means you just figure out what works and what doesn’t) I am writing again. For the moment, I’ve paused edits on Lens, and I’ve been remembering how to write with a new, completely off-brand for me Fantasy for this year’s Nanowrimo project, and it’s honestly going really well. I feel like I’m slowly digging myself out of this hole.

On the plus side, I can work on my own schedule because I plan to self-publish, but I am starting pretty much from scratch because of the last two (almost three) years. While disappointing, I’m feeling confident that I’ve finally had the shift that I’ve been struggling with for so long.

Onwards, y’all.

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To say that 2019 wasn’t kind to me was a little bit of an understatement. Three different (day) jobs, two close family deaths and just a multitude of things going sideways all contributed to me not making any head-way into the goals that I’d set for myself personally and professionally here as an author. 

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I came across a quote, “Love is friendship set on fire” somewhere out in the world, and tonight it just brought this scene to mind. While just a bit of flash fiction, I think I might have to come back to this character, as she seems to have much more to say.

Some days I can forget you. Some days I can forget the fact that from the moment I saw you I knew you were going to be the greatest love story of my life.

Some days I can forget how you saved me without even knowing what you had done, picked me up and set me up on my path with your smile. You didn’t even know who or what I was and you reached out to help. That’s just what you do.

Some days I can even forget how you ripped out my heart with your smile, wrapping your arms around her. I smiled along with you as you walked down the aisle to her, steeling myself by saying to myself that this was just what was meant to be.

Some days I can forget watching the two of you, wishing that I’d spoken up before you’d made your choice. Before you’d even had a choice presented to you. Before my fear of rejection took precedence over my possible happily-ever-after.

Some days I can remember you telling me how she ruined you, made you less of a person until you couldn’t take it any longer. Some days I can forget walking, drinking, as you poured your heart out in your words. I was made mute, keeping my heart bottled up because I was just starting to heal so many years down the road.

Some days I can forget how I lied to you, saying that I once had a crush, but it was no more. The bar stool became a vise, squeezing the lies out to make myself feel better, to pad up my heart from you before you ripped it to shreds again.

Some days I can forget how the wounds seeped open in my heart as I saw the new girl on your arm. I scalded my tongue with coffee to keep the lies from becoming the truth at the worst possible moment. I tried to be happy for you, starting to repair your own heart.

Some days I can forget how I walked away, letting you live your life without me. Some days I can forget how the heart doesn’t really heal, it just puts a layer of scar tissue to help you get through the days that you can’t forget any longer.

Some days I don’t even pull out your pictures any longer.

If only one of us could be happy, I always wanted it to be you.

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Work has been… well, work. I did start a Google Drive to throw the random prompts that I come across into… while I’ve got my long-form Nanowrimo idea doc already, most of those aren’t really made for short-form writing. I still think I need to get back into more short-form work – the more I look at the long-form pieces that I have partially finished, the more it bugs me that they’re still just partially finished.

Maybe I’m just over-thinking it – Which I’ve been known to do, just a little. 🙂

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