About Luna Nox

Stories have always been the place I run to when the world gets too loud.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Long before I knew what publishing meant, being an author was the dream. I didn’t need to be a bestseller. I just wanted someone, somewhere, to find one of my stories and feel something. Joy. Heartbreak. Hope. Maybe even that strange little ache a good story leaves behind when you aren’t quite ready to close the book.

Writing has always been my escape. My therapy. Sometimes even reading can’t give me the particular escape I need, so I make my own. I build people who don’t exist, give them complicated lives, and then promptly subject them to things I probably shouldn’t be allowed to do to fictional people.

My characters are little pieces of me. Sometimes it’s something obvious, like a favorite song or a sarcastic phrase. Sometimes it’s a thought that lasted five seconds and somehow became an entire person. An angry-looking cloud can become a story. A passing idea can become a character’s entire life.

And occasionally, a character dies because killing people is illegal. Fiction has its advantages.

The Stories I Keep Coming Back To

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to choose just one kind of story.

I gravitate toward romance, fantasy, darkness, and stories about people finding one another when they need each other most.

The details change. Sometimes there are demons and magic. Sometimes there are ordinary people trying to survive an extraordinarily dramatic mess.

But beneath all of them, I keep finding the same thing:

Love. Choice. And family.

Not necessarily the family you’re born into.
The family you find.
The family you choose.
The people who stay because they want to.

I’ve never stopped being fascinated by the idea that the people who become ours don’t always have the same blood running through their veins. Sometimes they’re the people who find us at the right moment, or the ones who stand beside us when walking away would have been easier.

So yes.
I’ll probably never stop writing about chosen family.

A Few Books That Made Me

There are far too many books and authors I could put here, but a few have stayed with me.

Eric Walters’ Rule of Three trilogy will probably always have a place on my shelf. I still haven’t found anything quite like it. The idea of an apocalypse built around something so ordinary and so fundamental as electricity fascinated me. No zombies. No nuclear wasteland. No virus. Just one day, the power disappears. I’ve returned to that story more times than I can count.

Eragon is another permanent resident of my heart. Christopher Paolini gave me dragons, and I have never quite recovered.

Brandon Sanderson taught me to look at powers and abilities differently, especially when politics, power, and adventure become tangled together.

Sarah J. Maas’ Crescent City series introduced me to something I didn’t realize I loved so much: mystery. Question after question, clue after clue, the story becoming a puzzle I desperately needed to solve.

And Rebecca Yarros has shown me something I think every writer secretly dreams of creating: a story that can make an entire community stop, gasp, theorize, argue, and mourn together.

There are many more. There will always be more.
That’s probably the problem with loving books.
There will never be enough time to read them all.

Behind the Pages

I write with music.
Almost always.
Music is the door to my soul, and every genre opens a different room. Finding the right music for the story I’m writing is sometimes half the battle.

For The Veilborn Heir, that meant plenty of moody academia, Stevie Howie, Hozier, and Celestial Tunes for certain scenes. If you know, you know.

My writing rituals are considerably less impressive.
There aren’t really any.
Give me music, low light, comfortable clothes, and my desk, and I’m usually happy.
About 95% of my writing happens there.
The other 5% tends to happen when something important refuses to wait.

The final three chapters of The Veilborn Heir were written in the car on the way to a funeral. There were typos. There were many typos. I didn’t care.
It was also some of the fastest writing I’ve ever done.

I usually begin a book by outlining everything. Chapter by chapter. Scene by scene. I build the entire skeleton before I write the first draft.

And then, somewhere around chapter five, that carefully constructed outline is set on fire.
The ashes are blown off a cliff.
I take the dive after them.
And hope my characters know what they’re doing.
They usually don’t.

Why Luna Nox?

Nox is Latin for night.
Yes, I am aware that Luna Nox essentially translates to Moon Night.
No, I don’t have a defense for that.
I suppose you could call the darkness an obsession.

But I’ve never thought of night as something frightening. There’s something quiet about it. Secret. Calm. Comfortable.

I’d choose howling beneath a full moon over burning beneath the sun any day.

I don’t remember exactly when the name appeared. I don’t even know if I chose it, or if it chose me.
It simply felt right.
And I’ve learned to trust that feeling.
So Luna Nox stayed.

Welcome to the darker corners of my imagination.
Stay awhile.