From there I moved to writing young adult novels—both horror and thrillers. I’m best known for Prom House (Delacorte/Underlined, 2021), which is a throwback to ’90s Fear Street and Christopher Pike with 10 teens renting a house prom weekend and one by one they start to die. Very fun. Lots of kissing.

My short fiction has been all over the place, too, but I’m delighted that my most recent published piece is one written in the Season of the Bear workshop at Storied Imaginarium. It’s titled “Hibernation Heirloom” (Sunday Morning Transport, 2023) and features a touched-out new mom seeking self care the hard way. 

Q. Can you tell us what inspired your Season of the Bear story? 

Motherhood? 

I’m only half joking. I have a three-year-old and still live in a state of perpetual fatigue—as most parents of littles do! The Season of the Bear had a module that examined bearskin stories as well as hibernation. While many Bearskin tales feature daughters fleeing gross fathers, I focused on the act of donning a bearskin as an act of freedom. Expectations were shed when fur appeared. 

So who needs hibernation more than a postpartum mom? Those early days of sleep deprivation and hypervigilance around your kid are real. The added layer of some lactating parents becoming more aggressive only added to the story of my mama bear who needed her own mother and a sense of peace and an excuse to let her husband take care of the baby while she rested. 

All of that came together in “Hibernation Heirloom.”

Q. How did you come to writing and who are some of your influences?

I’ve always been a writer. (Does everyone say that? Probably.) I had a career in journalism for many years, writing mostly pop culture, music, and lifestyle pieces, but when newspapers became an unstable workplace, I switched careers and became a marketer. Marketing is a lot of fun, but doesn’t have near enough writing to sate me. That’s when I began writing fiction. 

Q. Can you give us an insight into your writing process? Any habits when you sit down to write?

I find time whenever I can to write, so I’m much less focused on ritual and more on routine. I love to sprint in 20-minute bursts, because I can make my brain focus on the one thing for that long. Then I allow myself five minutes of checking email or scrolling Instagram, and back in until I hit my goal for the day. 

All that said, if I am at home, I’m likely to have a coffee on one side and a lit candle on the other. Right now it’s Alchemy & Ink’s “The Darkling” scent. It’s almost gone and I’m very sad because it’s a perfect moody candle. They describe it as “winter wind, night, bare branches,” and that feels about right for the domestic horror I’m working on!