Behind the work
The Writing Process
Fiction doesn't arrive fully formed. It surfaces slowly — pulled up from somewhere dark and patient. Here's what that looks like from the inside.
Where it starts
Every story I've written began the same way: with a feeling before a plot. Something unresolved. A pressure in the chest that doesn't have a name yet. I write toward that feeling until I find out what it is.
For this debut novel, it started with a question about depth — not metaphorical depth, but literal depth. What lives at the bottom of things? What does it want? What happens when it decides to rise?
01
Research as immersion
Before I write a word of fiction, I go deep into the real. Deep-sea biology. Pressure physics. The psychology of isolation. The mythology of water across cultures. I want the invented world to feel earned — like it could exist just beyond the edge of what we know.
02
Drafting in the dark
The first draft is written without looking back. No editing, no second-guessing, no reading yesterday's pages. I treat it like descending — you don't stop to check how far you've come. You keep going until you hit the bottom. Then you figure out what you found.
03
Revision as excavation
Revision is where the real work happens. The first draft tells me what the story is about. Every draft after that is about removing everything that isn't the story. It's slow. It's uncomfortable. It's the part I love most.
04
Voice above everything
Plot can be fixed. Structure can be rebuilt. Voice is the one thing you can't manufacture. I spend more time on a single sentence than most people spend on a chapter — not because I'm precious about it, but because the right sentence does ten things at once.
What feeds the work
The writers I return to most aren't always in the same genre. Cormac McCarthy for sentence-level brutality. Ursula K. Le Guin for world-building that feels lived-in. Jeff VanderMeer for the uncanny done right. Octavia Butler for the moral weight of speculative fiction. The ocean itself — which is not a book, but reads like one.
Right now
The debut novel is in revision. The bones are there. The creature is real. What I'm doing now is making sure every sentence earns its place — that nothing is decorative, nothing is easy, and nothing lets the reader off the hook.
If you want to know when it surfaces, the newsletter is the only place I'll announce it first.
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