I thought it was normal; I thought it was just another quirk of being alive that meant throughout life, when I saw my reflection, I wondered why I was who stared back.

Why was I me?

Why did my thoughts come out of me? Why did my voice exist in my chest? Why did the eyes I looked at look back at the face that I hated? That was too ugly, too blotchy. Belonged to a person too weird to fit in and too lonely to ever feel at home, no matter how many friends surrounded me?

I would destroy photos of myself as a child, the ones my mother coveted, and could never explain why I’d done it. I would obsess over flaws as my body changed through adolescence. Find new ways to battle it into submission. I’d steam my pores till my lungs struggled to hold air. I’d scrape my flesh with acids and creams that burned. Scorch my scalp with box dyes and prick my fingers into welts with needles to rip apart and restitch clothes just so I could feel, in any way, right. Not wrong. Not odd or off or outside of the world.

I scarred my body, but hid the tools and cuts, because that was the only way this form felt like something I owned and was me, not a thing I dwelled inside for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

With age, this persisted. I hid from mirrors. I hid from photos with friends. I hid behind scarves and shapeless shirts and draping coats, all to hide the bulbous meat I carted around daily.

Then, slowly, I hid from the world.

I hid from friends, let their ties turn threadbare and snap. I avoided nights out with colleagues. Never put my head above the parapet. Stayed underemployed, underachieving. I skipped concerts, events in my city. I travelled countries only with the safe shelter of my mother so I could hide behind her. But those too dried up, and I rejected opportunities for… everything.

I’m too sore.

Fatigue is brutal right now.

Migraine is too bad, sorry.

I’m busy.

I’m too broke.

I’m hiding behind an excuse for something I don’t understand.

Then I lost a baby, still in my belly, though I never got to meet it, and the excuses didn’t matter anymore. I stopped giving them. People stopped asking.

I had a son, the globe went into lockdown. I was alone, daily, just me and my world, and it was enough. But my form, my disgusting husk had changed and warped and morphed into this thing I didn’t recognise, and I stopped looking at it entirely. It had given life to the greatest joy I had known, after all the years of betrayal, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to love it. I couldn’t even bring myself to feel nothing. I was filled with loathing of what I had been caged to live inside. It wasn’t me. It was a hide. A suit of meat and bone and blood, and it was not and had never and could never be Me because if it was, what did that say of me as a person?

To exist as something so hideous and vulgar?

All my years I had wished to be someone else, because I had never felt like myself ever. My mind was a cluttered mess, so even that was strained, but that is who I was, not the shell on the outside.

Then I found out who I was, in the cruellest way. I found out my body had not been mine, had been taken from me too often. Had been pained and used and abused and discarded.

It has been a long road since then, and I still have not found a place where I feel at home in this body. I still find myself looking at others, wishing and longing to be in their bones. But I have come to appreciate it for what it is. Now I know the breadth of what it’s done, what it’s survived, what it has safely carried me through so I could be here now, lungs filling and heart beating and feeling all I touch. So I can hold my son. So I can embrace my husband. So I can touch, again, after a year of being unable to touch anyone and slowly clawing my way back to a place where touch felt safe, good, even. So I can type words and use my voice that was stolen and silenced over and over again by so many.

So I can exist, in a body that I hope will one day feel like mine.

So I no longer wish to be someone else, and can find peace at being simply Me.

Disclaimer: as with all things, my experience is my own and may be vastly different to another’s. If you’re interested in EMDR, please do your research and work with a trained therapist you trust. This may not be an easy read, so please do so with caution.

“I don’t want to die alone.” The words burst from me before I recognise them.

I hide behind my hands, sobbing, curling inwards.

“Sorry!” I say as my therapist hands me some tissues.

“Don’t be sorry,” she says, and she’s said it dozens of times at this point.

I hadn’t known that memory was buried in there, but in that moment it is all I can feel and I feel it as though I’m feeling it there and then in that room for the first time. I have to tell myself it’s not here; it’s not who I am. It happened long ago. What I’m feeling isn’t a “now” emotion. It’s long past.

Each week, for an hour and a half a day, I sit on a thick blue chair with that scratchy, burlap fabric with frayed edges the NHS loves to dot everywhere. My therapist sets up a light bar on a stand. I hold a paddle shaped like a comma in each hand. As the light strip travels to one end, the paddle vibrates on each apex, then makes the rapid journey the other way.

Bilateral eye movement is the core of what makes this therapy work. From what I understand, the movement stimulates both hemispheres of the brain and allows one to reprocess a traumatic memory in the here and now, in a safe and guided way, so the brain is better able to store it as memory correctly and not as an active event. No one knows exactly why Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) works, not even its inventor. And yet it continues to prove itself as the fastest, most effective way to treat my trauma.

But to sit there and do it, it makes no sense. It shouldn’t work, but it does every time, and I cannot wrap my thoughts around it. My brain feels like a broken machine in the days after. I am flooded with fatigue. I forget words, names, passwords. They simply don’t exist in my brain for a moment, sometimes hours. My whole mind has worked so hard to reprocess that there’s little space for much else.

The process digs around memories and emotions and even truths I believed about moments, people, or myself that I didn’t know were buried in my psyche. It has unearthed some truly awful things, including a third abuser.

It is not an easy process.

Due to a lifelong (unknown) habit of chronic dissociation and while still being in the thick of my worst PTSD symptoms, my therapist and I spent around nine months working on getting me to a point to be able to handle the process. At first, EMDR sessions would leave me so exhausted for days on end that I struggled to talk.

Now, it is easier.

As part of the process, I picked a target memory. It was a flashback that I couldn’t make sense of at all, couldn’t work out who or what was happening. But it would hit me fiercely and flood me with strong, ugly emotions. Then we talked about what feelings and emotions came up when I pictured the image.

I’m small. I’m ugly.

I’m a thing, not a person.

If this goes wrong, I will be in danger.

It was coupled with strong feelings of betrayal, disgust, and frustration. The frustration is what would hit me the hardest in flashbacks; it would come out of nowhere, but I’d feel it bloat and fill my chest, crush my lungs.

I was also tasked with coming up with truths I would like to believe instead, then asked on a scale of one to seven how strongly I believed them to be true.

They were all zero.

After that, we started.

I followed the lights, thought about the image and the feelings, felt the paddles vibrate in my grip. After a few minutes, my therapist would pause, ask where I am. She does this to check the memory is moving and developing and that I’m not stuck in one place. I didn’t need to say anything specific, but I often do, as I find talking helps me untangle thoughts.

For the first few stops and starts, nothing happened. Then, the image in my head changed. Like a developing photograph, only it showed me something from a different point in my life. A snapshot, maybe some words, general feelings. Things that felt in my whole being like truths I’d always known and never let myself actually hear.

Each week, my thoughts would jump around. Early in sessions I’d get close to a horrible thought, and the memory would zip to something different and distracting, but the eye movement would force it back to where it didn’t want it to go.

I had so many interconnected memories from that one strange image in my head that made no sense. The roots of it tangled and choked other moments all throughout my life I’d had no idea of.

I remembered being tiny, my mother leaning forward, face smiling at me as she asked if I’d enjoyed my trip, and I felt my chest rattle and I wanted to tell her something, I wanted her to fix something, but I didn’t even know what it was I wanted her to know or fix.

I remembered being a teenager, being furious at my parents, relishing when their life was hard because they deserved it for never ever knowing what was wrong with me.

I remembered walking up from anaesthetic after a miscarriage had left me haemorrhaging and losing consciousness on a floor, standing up and blood gushing out of me and feeling the intense fear. Of needing to clean it and hide it and run out of there before anyone saw.

I remembered my younger half-brothers, of feeling like I needed them to love me because if they did it meant I was loved by my family and if they didn’t, I had no place in my home.

I remembered voices scattered throughout the years. This is your fault. This is just a secret for us. You’d be really quite evil if you ever told anyone someone touched you; you’d make your mum so unhappy and ruin someone’s life. How’s your drink? Where you going? You should stay here.

Should we call the police?

I remembered so much touching, kissing, hushed words, smells, sounds. Fears coiling my throat and sludging my breaths.

I remembered the pain. The fighting. Scraping the skin off my fingers as I gripped the slats of the bunk above me. Hooking my arms in the ladders to keep me tethered and the crack in my shoulder. The sting, the way my whole body screamed with agony in the day after. All of it jumbled, spring back and forth from one attack to the next, to the next, to the next…

I remembered so much of the worst aches I’ve harboured my whole life, unknowing, but once I knew them through EMDR, it felt like I’d always known them; I’d just never let myself recognise it.

It took around nine sessions to get to the end of that one image. In it, I found that another had been involved in my childhood abuse. The image in my head was so garbled and stuck, because all three of them — the paedophile, the damaged child who knew the same cruelty I did from the same hands, and the teenage date rapist — all mirrored a similar place and manner above me. The memory had merged, three acetate sheets each with them all in a near identical way, placed upon one another, and it took all that time just to separate, find the truth of each.

I don’t want to die alone.

I was sixteen. Sixteen years old. Having just been destroyed. Unable to move by the drugs he’d spiked me with. Too confused and terrified by the violence he’d put upon me. Vomiting with such force it felt like my spine was cracking and my organs ripping. I was alone in that room. He left to get help, but in the moment I had no sense of that. All I knew was that I was going to die, he’d left me there, and I was petrified of being alone in it.

With each memory that comes back, no matter how agonising, they feel like a thorn I didn’t know was in my side is plucked free.

We reach the end of that memory despite the fact it has taken longer than I expected and a wealth of pains came up; I only realise I’m at the end of the “channel” when, after a 3-week break, it dawns on me I haven’t had the flashback we started with. It hasn’t come up once. It may still. Sometimes I feel my brain teasing towards it. But it hasn’t come up.

My therapist officially closes it off; we go back to those original questions, and what I hoped to feel instead. I will keep those private, but having started at a zero, all those positive things I’d hoped to wish for came to fruition. I was asked to think about the image and the new cognition, while the therapist did a short blast of the bilateral eye movement, and I found that thinking about the memory was fine. There were moments that even lifted my chest. Instead of thinking of that little girl who felt responsible for what was happening, as though she was tainted and wrong for allowing it, I instead saw her smiling. Truly, I just saw images of myself as a six-year-old smiling, running, giggling. How could she have been the disgusting, small thing I’d ever seen her as? She was just a child. She was innocent of it all.

She was me, and she is the part of me that saw more than just the horrible parts of a childhood that have choked my thoughts forever. She was happy. She was cheeky. She was playful. There was so much more to her than what happened behind shut doors.

And I am so much more than what I’ve lived through.

The process will be months, maybe a year. Each session gets easier. With each session I feel my ribcage loosen. I can walk taller and feel safer in doing so. I have no idea who I’ll be at the end, but I’ll stick with it until I’m there.

But here's the snag. I know what I'd ask me, and I'm far less interested in that than what you would ask.

So I'm here, humbly, for your input.

Anything you want to know about me, the book, the process? Ever had any questions thrown your way you absolutely loved or any you're desperate for someone to ask you?

It can be about books, writing, publishing, recovery in the middle of it, ADHD, art, hope, hopelessness, why I write the things I write, or anything at all that comes to mind.

Most of all, I'd love to know what you're actually curious about. If I've learned anything from the whole author thing, it's that the things people respond to are rarely the things I expected!

So, hit me with it!! What would you ask?

It's odd to see the dust of a person. To see a whole life and love scattered as ash on green earth. To see soft clouds of her roll on the air, carried away to be part of the world.

My whole world, as she was for so long. The happiness of my childhood, through so much turbulence. She was always there. Always loving and kind and good in a way that seemed ever impossible to achieve. Everything she did was in service of others.

As a teenager, she donated a kidney that to this day has kept her littlest sister alive more than forty-five years later. As a newborn, I came into a home with foster children always in my life, damaged girls in need of kindness that she so willingly gave. We had no money to spare, but she always found a way to sponsor children and donate to charity and care for those in her church who needed it.

She had flaws. Made mistakes. Was so far from perfect, but she was flawless to me.

In losing her, I've lost the last and only true goodness of my childhood. I've lost the only family I had for so much of my fractured youth.

I stand there at the foot of a mountain, watching more and more of her settle on the resting place of her own father as my family takes turns laying her to rest.

Here lie the remains of my mother. Here I stand, the remains of her. This loops in my head and I fight and feel myself lose against the tears I'm scraping from my eyes.

My son, he's only six but so bright, he turns to me, looks up to say something. I lean in, ready to comfort.

"Are you okay, mummy?"

The tears swell, but so do my cheeks. I beam at him.

I let go of one world today, but I leave with the only one that matters.

"I'm okay."

He cuddles into me, so gentle and kind and warm. Soon we leave, his soft hand in mine, leaving mountains and trees and the beautiful vastness of a still land at our backs.

I am what remains of my mother. He is what will remain of me.

I asked it when I slogged through shitty jobs that crumbled my self-worth.

I asked it when I was agented and growing more and more unhappy each day but couldn’t quit the industry I love, no matter how much of an act of self-harm it feels.

When my marriage was fissuring and relationships were corroding and I felt so deeply alone while still doing everything I could to uplift others at the expense of myself.

When I stared at a mirror, unsure why I was trapped in the body that stared back, wondering why I continued to exist this way when I simply did not want to.

And, most recently, why I’m on Substack and what I’m trying to do here.

I was recently reminded by some wonderful substackers (who I will keep nameless for now) about why I came here. I’d lost my purpose in what I wanted to say, what I wanted to make with my tiny patch of the internet.

And it is, so boringly, to talk.

But to talk specifically about surviving sexual violence decades after it ended.

When my memories of a decade of childhood abuses surfaced, I found nothing to cling onto to make me feel sane. I scoured the internet, emailed rape crisis charities, tried to make sense of what was happening to me in any way that I could. I am one of those people that has to understand things in order to accept them. I research things to a pointless degree just to settle the itch in my brain. So to be in a position that made no sense, that upended my life and had no clean answers, only made me feel more insane.

Imagine if you will, one day learning that not only is your life not what you thought, that you weren’t who you thought, and in the midst of that, being flooded with new flashes of memory of the worst things a person can endure. Things so awful and cruel that no matter how much you refused to believe they were real, the fact that they were so beyond anything you could have ever imagined or fabricated is the undeniable proof of their truth. Things so beyond the ordinary you haven’t been able to find a single account from another human that said, “Yes, this happened to me, too, and you’ll be okay.”

I was alone in my annihilation.

I found stories of people who later in life had the same sudden emergence of buried memories. I found stories of people who briefly awoke from their drugged states to find their bodies being violated. Who had a violent paedophile get them in their claws young and not let go.

But none from people who admitted to being threatened with untold violence into silence by a paedophile. None from people who repressed and later remembered every agonising second of a drugging and rape. None who were awake the whole time the GHB they’d been spiked with weighed down their limbs and made them unable to move. None who had been targeted in a premeditated attack by an infatuated boy who used drugs to force a relationship. And none with all of this and more suddenly appearing in their 30s, and would continue to vomit forth for the next two years.

I wanted answers to moor myself. Because I knew I couldn’t be the only person like this. It was and still is too unfathomable and cruel for me to be alone in this. I can’t believe that.

In the absence of answers from others, I decided to write a book about it in metaphor, so others would have what I’d needed.

Then I decided to talk about it here, on Substack, just in case one day someone like me stumbles onto it and gets answers I couldn’t.

I lost sight of that.

At my core, I am deeply damaged. I fear people’s approval and disapproval, because both are dangerous. I fear hostility. I fear saying too much and putting people off my book, thus killing my career before it’s started. I fear being boring and repetitive and so overthink what to share and what not to share because insignificance in the face of all I’ve overcome now would be oblivion. To be met with silence after decades of silence terrifies me. And I fear either of them finding out I know what they did and am talking about it.

But I am also filled with righteous fury. I am filled with spite and rage and refuse to be cowed by cruel, broken men who tried to break me and almost succeeded.

So that’s why I’m here. To talk about survival. Not the violence. Not what was done to me. Not how I overcame all the hurt and stood on the other side, whole and healed, because I don’t think I ever will fully be there.

I’m here to talk about the recovery. About life in the midst of this hell. About trying to survive this while simultaneously trying to build a career as an author and hold a job I’m proud of and raise a child who is the love of my life. To talk and give answers in the way I so desperately wished I’d had when I’d most needed it.

Maybe I should have waited till I was in a stable place, but that wasn’t what I needed to hear. I heard from so many who were on the other side, but their life seemed so out of reach from my own.

Moving forward, expect more of this.

I will still be me. I’ll still post my silly little notes about whatever flops into my head. I’ll still talk books and movies and adventures and all the quiet ways that make life loud and big. Because I’m a whole person, and I have to stay that way. I can’t be a monolith of survival and nothing else. But I want to be the space I needed two years ago, struggling to find reasons to choose to stay alive, and the space I still need now, where healing isn’t a thing I’ve reached but a place I’m slowly piecing together for myself.

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I think we all are. There’s been war. There’s been lunatics and a cabal of pedophiles running the world. There’s been a rape academy. There’s been shootings and murders and disasters, and it’s all such an intolerable amount that I truly wonder what this is doing to the collective mental health of a species. But still, in all that, what else can we do but plod on and hope life continues as it should.

To that end, I have plodded ever forward. I have finished A Book. To anyone who’s listened to me complain for a minute, you’ll know this is HUGE for me. I finished Washed Away By the Sea in September 2024, then… nothing. Was fighting so hard just to stay sane and alive that I had no space to write. Now, I’ve done it. I have a new book I am damned proud of. It is done!

Hooray!

But what now?

I have been debating this. As I’ve said before, my last experience being agented had some incredible highs, but some crushing lows. The experience proved to be too unhealthy to sustain, so I stepped away from it and, potentially, trad publishing.

I left shortly after the sale of WABtS in April 2025. At that time, my mother was on a very short timescale, and died within six months from liver cancer, after having endured it for three years. My mental health was sliding backwards, and I was signed off sick from work for a long time due to being a suicide risk. I had nothing to give. Absolutely nothing. Odd, how distant a time that feels to me now, yet it really wasn’t all that long ago.

So I stepped back, possibly forever, while I took my slow time picking up the cracks of my life and trying to shape them into something somewhat whole again.

But now, as I move on and life plods, I am thinking about what next, and I think I will try again to find a new agent. I know the flags to look for this time, I know where I was naïve and how to advocate for myself properly. I also know what I’m capable of, and believe me, it is a lot.

I know the answer to the question, “What’s the worst that can happen?” because I’ve lived it. Survived it. And am somehow still here to talk about it.

The New Book has been through my first reader, who would never in a million years pick my book up off shelves because she hates contemporary settings and straight horror. So getting her seal of approval means I’ve done something right. It is now with my second reader, who has graciously made space in her extremely busy schedule for me, and my god is she thorough. She’s a wizard for a line edit. I can think something is perfect, and she’ll weed out snags. I love both of these women dearly; I would be a far weaker author and, frankly, person without them. They know what they did for me when I most needed it, and I’ll never be able to repay them.

Then, I think I’ll send it out into the wide world to see what happens. If anyone happens to know an agent who wants weird psychological horror about repressed hungers, violent indulgence, and a woman willingly going mad for both, lemme know!

But, in the meantime, life.

I have been with a phenomenal psychological therapist for about six months, and she has dragged me out of the barbed shell I’d hidden myself away in. I’ve lived in a state of chronic dissociation my whole life owing to all that violence I’d amnesia’d away. But the distance between me and, well, me, got worse, and I would get furious at the notion of grounding and being present. She’s worked diligently in helping me feel safe in a body, in the moment. So we are finally ready to start EMDR.

The first session is Friday, and it will continue for as long as is needed, so once more I may retreat. I don’t know how hard this will be, and honestly, I’m terrified there’s more I’ve buried, because what I’ve already unearthed was more than I knew how to bear. So awful, violent, and cruel. If there’s more hidden, it has to be worse than what I’ve already recovered, and I don’t know how to survive this again. But somehow, I will have to find a way.

As with all survivors, we didn’t have a choice, and the only one we can make in the aftermath is to live with it, or we don’t survive. So I will live.

And I hope, when it’s done, I can continue to get to know this New Me. I’ve been meeting her slowly, greeting her like someone new I’ve known my whole life. She feels like me, but I am not yet her, and I hope to someday be this unknown person who wears my skin with ease and fills this body with joy and not self-destruction. Who thinks my thoughts freely and without fear, without hiding.

Maybe someday.

But for now, I have a book coming out in a few months, a new one recently finished, I have the medical care I need. I have a future that doesn’t look as bleakly hopeless as it once did. I have something, and I’m holding onto it with everything I have.

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I am dyslexic. I’ve been open about it. I can’t change it. I am mortified by it.

I am by no means the only dyslexic author on the planet. To reuse a favourite joke from Arrested Development, there are dozens of us! But my dyslexia isn’t limited to just misspellings or difficulty with words.

It bleeds into everything I write. I use words wrong. My sentences follow clauses that are antithetical to the norm. I rely on descriptions in odd ways. But it goes deeper than that.

Back when I was diagnosed in school, they explained it was dyslexia (reading), dysgraphia (writing), dyscalculia (numbers), and informative dyslexia (information). This means I have a “comprehension dysfunction”. Instructions that may be completely easy for others to parse, I struggle to understand. The many rules of writing don’t come easily to me, and I can’t make sense of the advice offered to fix it.

Things like “pacing needs tightened,” meant nothing to me. Sentiments like “interiority needs adjusted,” were alien. “Too many repeated words,” crushed me. I have spent years writing for fun. But when I decided to take it seriously, I found myself in a Sisyphean struggle because with every new rule I managed to digest, I found another thing I was doing wrong.

I do, however, come from a long line of storytellers. On my mother’s paternal side, we have an ancestral war bard! An honest to god bard of war. And I was raised on my grandfather’s stories. On my mother’s maternal side, we’ve got more bards! A large part of Gaelic culture — of which I descend — is oral history. It was an incredible honour to be tasked with the oral history of a family, and I have a relative alive today who carries this tradition, able to recall our history back 13 generations. I loved books as a child, so many core memories are of reading or being read to, and I’ve always been enrapt by the stories my family would share with me.

Stories have never been the issue. I have a rampant imagination, have been writing mad tales since I was six. The issue has always been in the language of them. How I put them to paper. How I delve and explore ideas through a mosaic of just 26 letters.

This has meant I overly rely on certain things to compensate for the areas I lack. I structure my novels meticulously to compensate for the fact that I am unable to sustain a story through soft prose, and pacing has never been something I can easily grasp. I give each character a distinct voice out of fear that readers may struggle to follow scenes, as I struggle with the blocking of them. I delve heavily into metaphor and thematic language as my throughline because it’s the only way I know how to get the message across. Weather, atmosphere, and environment are crucial to me and become their own beast within my words so I can ground my story in a sense of place.

I also have ADHD, but how that impacts storytelling is an essay for another time.

Over the years, I have amassed my own set of “rules”. I call them my little Rolodex of writing tricks. As a young woman in the world of work, my inability to easily grasp words shamed me profoundly. I am extremely professional in work and books, though I am a clown in my real life. I spent months on the train to work, handwriting all the words I struggled with so I could understand them. Reams of “there, their, they’re — where, were, we’re”. I taught myself the rules of grammar to the best of my abilities, and even now they do not come easy. I have to stop, work through the order of a word and the rules around grammar, remind myself how it works, then write it. This birthed the Rolodex. It’s how I navigate the written world.

Dyslexia, as I found, is not a misunderstanding of language. But simply a different means of processing information. For the average person, if you tell them to imagine the word Cat, then remove the C, quickly they can say “at.” For a dyslexic, we have to imagine the word in full, actively remove the C, then reassess to get the answer.

But every time someone highlights a typo, or a word that simply is made up, wrong, or in any way an abhorrence of language, I despise myself. I have worked hard as hell to overcome this barrier to the thing I love so incredibly much, and it is never enough. It cracks the high standards I hold myself to, showing how I’ve failed.

I know this isn’t true; it’s a dramatic, crushing way to think. But it has not changed the 30 years I’ve known written words, and it will not change any time soon.

So all I can do is trust that I am doing enough. All I can hope for is that my words do their best and readers can follow. That I’ve done my best, armed with my little Rolodex, and that I can still write stories people love, strangeness be damned.

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It’s not an uncommon thing to wonder why a victim is chosen. The rhetorics around “what were they wearing, did they lead them on,” have been around so long they’re used now as evidence of how unfair it is to assume a victim is in some way at fault.

It’s never the fault of the victim. While we may drown asking what could have been done differently, how we could have saved ourselves, it’s ultimately not on us.

However, I know what I could have done differently. And it is entirely on me.

The vast majority of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. We think of rapists as springing out of dark alleys, and that does happen, but more likely it’s someone you know.

I knew my rapist.

But he knew me in a far different way than I could have ever been prepared for.

We first met when I was four, then fell out of each other’s orbits and reconnected again when I was eleven.

We got on well, as we had before. I enjoyed his company. I enjoyed teasing him and joking with him. I enjoyed being his friend.

It didn’t last long.

He changed. Became brash and dismissive. He got annoyed at my jokes, refused to engage in conversations. Refused to acknowledge me at all. I remember it being one of the earliest rejections of friendship in my life, and it hurt.

He obviously hated me. I was too annoying, too loud. Had pushed someone away by being me – my eternal failing.

He never said any of this, of course. But I knew.

We were forced to be within each other’s proximity constantly after that. I avoided him as best I could. Why would I want to be around someone who clearly hated me? He would glare all the time, huffed when I was giggling and being stupid with friends. Grumbled and pouted on the rare occasions I couldn’t maintain the distance between us. The way he reacted made me feel tiny.

But despite that, in a way I only ever carried internally, I would root for him. We had been friends, after all. One of my earliest. He was bright and ambitious, and I was glad to see him succeed.

For years, we never shared a word, then, when I was sixteen, he showed up at a party.

And I was stunned.

My group of friends were overwhelmingly oddballs he had absolutely no connection to. As he walked in, he looked at me immediately, jacket not yet off, and I shrank.

He’d grown close to my friends while I’d had no idea of it. They’d grown without me. I felt shunned, a feeling I had known my whole life and had never quite managed to harden myself against. And given his enormous, obvious dislike of me, I knew I’d spend the whole night avoiding him.

But that wasn’t what happened.

He stopped me. Started conversation with me. Spent the night getting closer to me.

Then he started flirting. I remember the exact moment. How surprised and confused I was. Here was this boy – this lost friend – and we fell into the easiest dynamic. Just as we had all the years before. But now it was something new.

And he remembered all of these little things about me throughout the years. So many moments where I’d been stupid, made jokes, injured myself or vanished completely for a while.

Then he got jealous. I didn’t recognise it. Then he got possessive. And still I did not recognise it. Disguised as playful banter, as a joke.

It is only with hindsight that I see the danger my sixteen-year-old self could not.

He’d harboured feelings for me that whole time, it turned out. The glares had been of attraction, of obsession. The strong, disgusted reactions had not been that at all, but a boy overwhelmed by something dangerous growing inside of him. He sabotaged and damaged my things periodically to get my attention, and I’d never known it was his doing. He had these great plans and ways to tell me how he felt. I had inadvertently thwarted each and every attempt he made to be close to me.

So he created a new plan, one I couldn’t ruin.

He did not drug me that night to have sex with me. He raped me to own me.

To force me to be his. To entangle us in a relationship he craved and would see exist, regardless of what I wanted. Even when I fought and thrashed and used the last of my dwindling energy to shove and shout, he still had to see his plan through. Nothing would deter him.

He held me, caressed me, told me he loved me, all while I rotted on the inside in the single most terror I have ever known. He gripped fistfuls of my hair, almost ripping them from my scalp in the height of his fervour, then twirled those same locks gently in his fingers when he was finished. He moaned heavily in my ear, touched and squeezed every part of me, kissed me over and over and lived a moment he’d dreamt of for I can’t imagine how long, while I had become nothing beneath him. I was an empty doll, only aware I was crying because I could feel my tears escape the outer edges of my eyes.

He worshipped me with grotesque gentleness and catastrophic violence at the same time. Devoured me, brutalised me, and adored me all at once.

While he saw a moment long-sought after realised, I thought I was going to die. I truly believed he was going to murder me. I couldn’t breathe under the weight of his collapsed and exhausted form on mine. I couldn’t understand why he was doing that to me, or how I got into that room, or why I couldn’t move my body.

I still feel the way his heart raced against my bare chest.

I still see the way he stared at me throughout.

Then I slipped further and further away. Sinking into a place you can’t rise from, and I do not mean that figuratively. It felt like dying. And I knew it. I already felt dead when he delicately redressed me, treating me like I was the most precious object in the whole world. But what I felt was something far beyond emotional death.

Then the vomiting started, and it’s what saved me from him in the end because I know his pursuit of me would not have stopped that night. Saved my life too, as the poison was purged from my stomach. My body’s last, life-saving tactic.

But there were witnesses to my distress. My hysterical tears, half-naked body covered in vomit. I remember the noisy chaos, the screams thrown at him, the lies he defended himself with. Even then, he refused to let me go while I tried feebly to scrape myself across bathroom tiles to get away from him. He was thrown out, punched in the street. He never came near me again. I owe more than I can repay to the only friend who stood up for me that night and who finally got him away from me. But in the morning, I remembered none of it, and whether or not anyone doubted me when I said nothing happened, they didn’t press it.

So many never knew why their rapist chose them, did that to them.

But I know why.

I wasn’t unlucky. I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. A boy wanted to take me because of who I am. And yet, it is so farcical that I struggle daily to believe it’s at all possible. To know that there is nothing I could have done that would have changed the outcome, because he’d already decided it long before he showed up at that fucking party. My sin in all this was being me.

And I don’t know how to live with that.

My rape was a premeditated, targeted attack by a teenage boy who wanted more than he was ever due, so he took what he decided he was owed. If he hadn’t succeeded that night, I have absolutely no doubts he would have another night.

I repressed seven years of sexual violence before it. That I can fold away and understand. This I can’t.

I felt insane when it first came back to me. I remembered the conversation, the way he was furious and pained when I teased him for hating me, and when he finally admitted the truth. But how could that have been real? How could something so unbelievable be my story?

I couldn’t find any stories like this. It had never even occurred to me someone might use date rape as a means of forcing a relationship, for that had been his final plan. To fall asleep beside me, to tell me how we’d had drunken sex in the morning, to use that as an excuse to keep me in his hold. He wanted to be my first and for me to be his, as though it would somehow make it special. As though the story in his head, the fantasy he conducted of me, was destined.

And he got so close to it, too. But in the end, it was just another of his plans I thwarted.

Not all rapists lurk in alleys. Some use drugs and stalk and hunt because they’re too afraid of rejection. Some wait years, planning, watching. Some invite themselves to parties with people they barely know just to get their hooks in someone they want beyond anything reasonable. And maybe one day I’ll be able to accept that beyond the violence and pain he subjected me to. But I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully let go when the reason the violence happened at all is so intertwined with me as a person.

It wasn’t my fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened because of me.

And the greatest tragedy? While the drugs he’d spiked me with already started working their way through me, I was excitedly planning to give him my number before the night’s end. He could have had what he’d wanted, if only he’d been human.

Rape is so cruel that we often need to make sense of the motives to make any sense of it at all. But I know the motives. I know the why. I know the method and the planning, and it makes less sense to me than anything I have ever known.

I won’t buck a trend today, but as I crawl out of the depression hole I found myself in after my mother’s passing — and a brutal bout of sickness (seriously, still can’t believe I fainted), I’m getting back into the swing of fiction writing again.

Ironically, I can’t come up with the words to express what this means to me.

Writing

After finishing Washed Away By The Sea, which I wrote in a manic frenzy throughout August & September 2024, I’ve been stuck. I’ve done edits and light rewrites of things, but I was aware of the struggle it was to make words work at all. It gnawed on my thoughts constantly. I’d gone from writing the best thing of my career to barely being able to form a sentence.

I’ve worked damned hard to get to a place where I could write again, and, what, a year and a half later, I’m finally right on the doorstep.

The words aren’t as smooth as I would like. They still feel constrained and stiff, but they have loosened to such a magnitude that, for the first time in so long, I think I might actually be able to write another book.

And it is a fucking doozy.

What to know about me is that I love building my books with wild, unhinged ideas, concepts, and themes. I love to stitch genres together that don’t belong. But what I pride myself on is taking those ludicrous ideas and making something true, elevated, and emotionally resonant. I write literary horror (at least in the adult space). But I love to do so on a foundation of playful nonsense.

So what’s this new project about? I don’t want to say yet, because I like keeping a book close to my chest till it is done. That way, I can prove to myself first and foremost that I’ve been able to actually pull it off. But needless to say, I’m listening to a lot of weird rave tunes while I write it. It’ll be another psychological horror, as that’s my favourite space to play in, and another contemporary gothic with a twist. Another favourite of mine. But set in a world I have never walked into myself, so let’s see if I can do it justice.

Life

On personal things, therapy progresses well. It sucks. It’s hard. The other morning I had to explain (briefly, I might add, and rushed, and fully dissociated) about the first ever time I was attacked when I was six. I’ve never told anyone. Never said the words out loud. Then I went home to work and was online till midnight on a piece for violence against women and girls. My life is odd. So on the nose an editor would tell me I’m trying too hard.

My psychologist explained there are two types of PTSD, and that I have both.

Surely I deserve some kind of cosmic medal for that?

On publishing, which is a whole other looming beast I’ll need to wrestle, I am anxious as all hell. The team at Quill & Crow are extraordinary. I have never felt so well taken care of in any of my publishing experiences. We recently had a chat and have agreed to a change, meaning my book will now be available worldwide with future hopes of selling it for translation, etc. I’m slowly researching marketing. Have zero idea how I’m going to try and convince people to stock my book in their shops or invite me to talk at things, be part of festivals. But for now, I’m trying to build vague lists of options that could be an avenue in the future.

If anyone wants to hold my fragile little hand and share with me words of marketing wisdom, I will gobble that up.

Meantime, inspired by all of you because oh my god you’re all brilliant, I am going to see if I can’t find a prompt generator and start writing horror shorts. I’m still struggling with concepts, and I’ve never been great at an idea for short stories; I’ve always needed a steer. Not sure if I’ll share them, but I think if nothing else, it will get my brain muscles flexing again.

But coming to substack, reading your stories, essays, reviews has truly been such a boon to my own wilting creativity. You’ve helped me find my love for it, pushed me to nurture my skills, all while being so kind, supportive, and welcoming of everyone in your communities. I want to challenge myself, push myself to be as good as all of you.

I feel like I’m standing by the knees of giants, and you’re all kindly kneeling down to meet me at my level. But I want to meet you at yours, and I probably won’t get there, but my god I want to try. And the fact I want to try at all really is evidence of how far I’ve come from the broken ghost I was not so long ago. So thank you. Really.

I hope to do you proud.

I can’t eat.

It’s after five. Dinner is being cooked while I avoid the kitchen, cannot stomach the sight or smells of the crisping vegetable flesh.

This will be my first meal of the day, and if not for the fact that whatever is being cooked is being cooked for me, I likely wouldn’t eat at all.

I get the food: roasted vegetables, rice, fish. No seasoning. No sauce. Merely a little oil from the cooking process.

I swallow quickly, without thinking about the pulpy mouthfuls congealing under my teeth or sliding down my throat.

Hunger starts to flicker in a way that feels muted, a mutt growling at my feet. I know it should be louder, should be screaming and ravenous. I feel the emptiness of my stomach and the cramping in my gut as food fills me, yet I do not feel hunger in a way that can be satiated. It is simply a hollow that reminds me it needs to be filled. And even then, the hollow speaks quietly.

I hope this will spark my want to eat. I may seek out fruit plucked from bushes, fresh and juicy, or something savoury that crunches like twigs underfoot. Maybe the hunger will finally appear full and awake and I will graze on everything, unable to stop, even as it serrates the roof of my mouth, burns blisters in my tongue.

If I’m unlucky, I will reach a point where the meal is intolerable. My jaw will lock, my tongue will revolt, and I will be devoured by panicked urgency to spit it out where nothing will prevent it, and nothing else will pass my lips thereafter.

Atypical Eating Disorder.

The assessing nurse seems to not understand that coffee is one of the few pleasurable experiences that fills my senses in a day and is used for enjoyment, not appetite suppression. She suggests my large consumption of water is a means of keeping hunger hidden, or that my love for walking is about counting steps. I say no each time she makes an assumption that’s false. She asks me about calories, I say I don’t count them, and in fact if I could chew some pill that had all my daily needs and meant I never had to eat again, I would take it.

She sucks a breath I don’t know how to interpret.

I don’t see her again. I’m referred to one-on-one therapy with a specialist psychologist.

I did not know I had developed a disorder until it had devoured me whole. I assumed my inability to eat was from stress and not a sign of something much more dangerous.

My lifelong food intolerances, a symptom of an undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, brutally assaulted me post-Covid infection. I spent years learning through agonising trial and error what foods would make me too sick to stay conscious. Which ones would cause my gums to bleed and my guts to convulse.

Food became dangerous. Solids were avoided during the work day to ensure I could do my job, pushing my meals further and further back so I could be present for my child and not be overcome with pains and confusion and a fatigue so throttling I would be unable, no matter what I did, to stay in my body, keep my mind with me, and not drift away for hours at a time.

My therapist is furious when I explain this. She swears, she apologises for being unprofessional, but she’s horrified, she explains, that I was left to deal with a known precursor to disordered eating, alone.

But I’d held it together. I’d coped. I spent three years curating a bubble for myself that allowed me to function. Trauma, naturally, drove a stake through my cocoon and ripped me violently from its safety.

I stopped eating when the memories came back. Couldn’t will myself to. Days of little to no food stretched to weeks. When I ate, my stomach rampaged and warred and flooded my insides with histamines that swelled my knuckles and clawed at my muscles.

It felt good. To have control. To have a mastery over my body and how it could function on nothing, fuelled purely by what I decided it do. And still, I did not see how the beast I was feeding grew and stretched and consumed.

The years have taught me food is poison, and in its absence, I find strength.

But, of course, it was a lie fed to me by the beast of my hunger.

Eating solids before the day leaves morning is a goal I hold daily, hit monthly if I’m to be honest.

Filling myself with nourishment that does not poison or pain is a risk I often do not take.

There are stretches where I eat more, days where I fill my belly with carbs and cheese and sugar and feel glad for it. Every time I think I’m cured. I never had an eating disorder. I never had any problems at all.

But it always passes, and I’m always left with the emptiness that keeps me company.

Today, though, I eat my rice and my vegetables and my white fish, and my mind and body know food is safe. I follow it with grapes, then peas and plain pasta some hours later.

Tomorrow might be different. Tomorrow might be the day that I win and eat before night. Tomorrow my slavering hound may rule, and I may find eating impossible until it rests again.

But that’s tomorrow.

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We need to talk about rape, and listen to all the voices who do.

I can’t imagine this being a surprise to anyone, but society at large doesn’t like to discuss one of its ugliest, most abhorrent crimes. Not surprising. It’s awful. We don’t want to think about it; it’s too unfathomably cruel, too widespread.

When we’re faced with stories, see streams of news reports recounting acts so foul we can’t stomach imagining what the sufferers must have endured, it naturally curdles in our thoughts.

What if that was me? What if it was my loved ones and friends? What if a perpetrator is someone I know? How could I protect myself if it happened to me?

How could I stop it?

Because the truth no one wants to face is that it could happen to us. It could happen to the ones we love. And for countless, that’s already our reality.

Before I remembered my lost past, I did try to do my part. I would share news on the subject, have discussions with friends, support those who had their own experiences with violence.

I knew statistics, I knew signs to look for. I knew what consent was and did everything to keep the people I loved safe. But I never talked about it publicly. Wasn’t my place to. Wasn’t my story to tell.

I realise now that was wrong.

Silence throttles victims of sexual violence: it perpetuates abuse, frees abusers from consequence, and forces survivors to suffer alone.

Society bolsters this.

Rape, assault, sexual violence. It’s rare to see any of these said so cleanly outside of the news or essays like that. Instead, they’ve been replaced with Grape, SA, or goddamned emojis. Even in general conversation, on platforms that don’t immediately flag these words and remove posts, people still will resort to these cushioned terms. Shave off their sharper edges.

Rape.

The word we have to protect everyone from hearing.

But what about those who lived it?

Because hearing about someone’s rape is never, ever worse than what the person who endured it has known.

Why do we protect everyone before survivors?

Why do we force them into silence and allow the rest of the world to shout? Why do we make them carry the secrets that belong to their monsters?

Rape is an evil that gleefully festers when ignored. Loudly says that no one speaks up when someone steals another person’s body and soul for their own gratification. It shows them that if they enact their worst pleasures, the world will do nothing in response.

And I’m done with that.

I know I am one voice out of many talking about sexual violence, raising awareness in any way I can. My reach is small, and right now I’m not pushing for more to protect myself.

But I knew early I was going to lend my voice to the conversation because if I do that, and if any one person reads my words and it eases their ache even for a moment, then talking is worth it.

Discussing my pain in places like this is worth it if it shares even a fraction of the load for someone else who knows what this hell is like.

I’ve said this before, it’s not a new sentiment.

But imagine if you had a friend or loved one who never felt safe sharing their own story, who carried it like an intolerable weight, who one day saw you speak up. Watched you stand firm for the millions who couldn’t. Read your words and heard your voice and knew they weren’t alone.

Imagine what that could do.

Imagine the friend who has a pushy partner who begs them into sex they don’t want, and you said, “talk to me”.

Imagine the friend who makes jokes dangerously dark that sets a pit in your stomach, and you said, “that’s not okay.”

Imagine if you heard the story of a lonely person in a dark hole you cannot even imagine be brave enough to share their thoughts and instead of scrolling on by you stopped, you read their words, and you lend them the littlest amount of courage.

Not everyone can talk about their experiences, and no one should be forced to. So couldn’t, and more importantly, shouldn’t we do it for the ones who can’t?

My childhood abuser threatened me into silence. My date-rapist used drugs to mute me. My family, who should have seen the signs, turned away. My friends, who witnessed me unable to use my own body, half-naked, hysterical, and violently overdosing, all said nothing. And not because anyone was cruel or negligent. Society had already taught them to look the other way, to not confront what they knew in their bones to be true, while I remained blissfully ignorant in amnesiac repression.

The ones who listened to me now, when it all came back, saved me from it.

Imagine who you could save if you didn’t ignore it the way everything larger than us tells us to.

Rape is not a mythic monster — it is a crime committed by people, and it thrives when we refuse to name it. But each time we talk, we give it less power. Pull out its fangs and blunt its claws. It shows would-be rapists that if they succumb to their twisted fantasies, the rest of us will be there to scream and shout and ensure they face the societal consequences of their actions, and that their victims do not have to carry it alone.

It takes so little effort to help corrode its hold on us all.

All we have to do is not feed it our silence.

All we have to do is talk.

I’m Shauna. I like words and stuff. In the unending cosmic joke that is my life, I’m also dyslexic.

To add to that, I have adhd, ptsd, and a litany of health problems. I’m a rabid dork and if I can make a joke no matter how profoundly stupid, I will.

The things I write are very much at odds with my general personality. I write horror. I write trauma and grief and heartfelt stuff. I want to make people feel the best and worst of things. My books are my art, and that’s super wanky to say, but I just enjoy the challenge of making my prose literary while working in mad genre mash-ups.

Even though I am a disaster human and prefer to hang out with chaos and calamity, I actually have the most almost surgical approach to my novels. I plan them, I create countless spreadsheets to organise my ideas, themes, characters and plot, and I fill in my outline as I write so I have a utilitarian control over the story. I love the abstract, the liminal and surreal. I love writing a book where I ask my readers to put their faith in me and at the end prove it was worth it and I knew what I was doing all along, even if it didn’t seem like it.

Outside of books, I am a Big Old Dork and love to fall into holes of sporadic learning, sinking far too many hours into video games, worsen my growing tinnitus with thick and heavy music (and some sad Icelandic piano). I love to read, I love to wander and explore, and regularly drink eight coffees a day. I am a mother to the most wonderful goblin. I have a job I love. Friends I adore.

And I shouldn’t be alive.

When I was sixteen years old, I was drugged and raped in a premeditated, targeted attack. I would have died had my attacker not saved my life. It was so violent and so cruel, I repressed it. As well as a long history of sexual violence before it. A decade of horrors hidden from myself, until 2024. I’ve spoken of this before, and it is by no means the core sum of my parts, but the space it consumes within me is colossal.

But, importantly, I am stubborn. Fiercely stubborn. I do not let anything get the better of me, not even myself. I battle my body when it breaks down. Demand more of my mind when it withers and crumbles. Force myself over hurdles I set for myself purely to see if I can. I will fight and war for what I believe in.

Which is why, my debut novel, the book of my heart and the one that I am so endlessly proud of, directly tackles rape. It is terrifying to put myself on a stage in this way. But rapists thrive in silence and I will not grant that to mine.

I also one time met Queen Elizabeth while standing beside a crying clown. That was weird.

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It’s cold. So unbelievably cold. It’s numbing and scorching and frosting to the point my bare fingers are pink and on fire as my blood swells to warm me.

Funny, the way our bodies keep us alive. How they run of their own accord to keep us going, keep us beating and breathing and feeling.

I wonder if others feel the detachment I do. Does everyone feel they are separate from the thing that carries them through life? Do they feel each movement and touch and pain as though something to be endured from an outside force and not within oneself?

I read once that we can always see our nose. It’s always in our vision; if we pay attention to it, it suddenly sharpens and appears. Our brains just blur it, ignore it, remove a necessary stimulus we don’t need. Our minds do this thousands of times a day, run little functions to keep us wandering onward always, without us being aware.

I am aware, though.

I feel every time I detach.

Every time my emotions become such a tempest that I cannot breathe under its force and suddenly shut off and there is nothing but absence. I catch the way I scan faces, eyes jumping from one fair-haired man to the next. Hunting for those bright eyes I see daily, nightly. In waking hours, in nightmares.

I know when control is falling away from me, when the fear that hooked me so strongly as I thought I was dying as a child rears up, devours, and I watch myself from a distance as I become a stranger to even myself. A beast of teeth and poison, lashing out, warring against the world and everything in my path.

The wind rushes across my ears, my cheeks. Heat rushes to them. My eyes sting, vision blurs. My fingers are too swollen to tense, but I do it anyway.

I feel the throb and the tightness, I feel each caress of the sea graze my ankles. I feel the salt of tears on my skin and the sinking of my stomach, the catching in my throat with each whimpering inhale.

I feel a body I know is mine, yet was so cruelly denied me.

I feel a heart beat as it has done so many times when it should have stopped.

I feel air in my lungs and life in my bones and the weight of standing in this moment, in this existence, too heavy to bear.

I shudder, my sob jolting my chest. Even now, after all these years, I can’t control my body. It does what it will, no matter what I say. It healed the scars I carved into myself. It endured a poison of painkillers stolen in a still day where I had no longer wanted to endure life. It forced a purge as I slipped towards death at the hands of a greedy boy who had decided I would be his. It kept functioning as I bled on hospital beds and lost consciousness from pain and abused it and harmed it throughout all the years I have known, to make it be mine in the only way I could.

But it gave me life. It created and safely carried my son, it survived and held on so we could deliver him safely and raise him lovingly. It kept me here and now, to meet the people in my life, to fall in love, to catch glorious moments where life is worth every second of the pain of living.

The beach is calm. Pebbles tangle through the shore. The sky is thick and grey and soft.

I am here, in it. Grateful to be alive despite all that could have ended all I know. My body is still detached, but the distance less stark. Less cleaved in two, we now walk side by side. It is not quite mine, it is not quite me. But we are an us. We exist together, we fought together.

We survived together.

We will endure this, too.

In this series, I talk about the things that wormed their way into my head and refused to leave. Books, music, movies, or whatever else got stuck there. Some influenced my creative endeavors. Some just became deep loves I’m far too nerdy about. Don’t expect a thorough review, but do expect my overly excitable ramblings.

Spoilers ahead, you’ve been warned.

Ahh, The Princess Bride. How very original of me. But let me join a million other people in gushing about it anyway.

I’d been writing since I learned how to write, again, how original I am. But it’s true. First story I ever wrote was about 50 words, I was 6, it was a horror. I continued writing about monsters and stupid jokes that made me laugh every now and then, always just for fun.

Then I read The Princess Bride in my mid-20s and knew I wanted to try my hand at writing proper books.

I, like countless other kids, was forced to watch the film with my parents who told me I would love it. They were right, obviously. Of course I fucking loved that movie. My mum found the book in a charity shop many, many years later. Read it. Loved it. Threw it at me and demanded I give it a go. So I did.

I read it.

I loved it.

It was the first book I ever laughed out loud at, and in the train home after work, no less. Made a right tit of myself trying to stifle my snorting laughter.

The Princess Bride

For those who somehow don’t know — though I can’t fathom how you wouldn’t! — The Princess Bride is the greatest love story ever told. A “classic” Florinese novel written by S. Morgenstern and abridged by William Goldman, who went on to write the screenplay for the beloved cult film.

Throughout the book, Goldman talks about the bits he’s removed, abridged, and why. His struggling relationship with his son and his fierce rivalry with Stephen King. His life is comically depressing.

But he’s emboldened by this book he’s never even read, somehow convinced he’s the one to abridge it for modern audiences. In abridging it, he admits he didn’t even read the whole thing because he didn’t need to – his dad read it to him as a bedtime story. Really, he comes across as a bit sad. The novel is spliced with the actual tale of Buttercup, Westley, Fezzik, and Inigo and his own adventures in trying to get the thing to print.

Only… none of that’s real, and it’s probably the greatest hoax ever published.

Goldman made it all up. The Princess Bride started as a bedtime story for his daughters – he doesn’t even have a son. Morgenstern doesn’t exist. The “original” novel doesn’t exist. The author’s notes, his complaints about cutting pages of boring court history and reams of pages of wigs, the kiss that ended all kisses you can only get if you write to his publisher with the full address printed right there in the book — it’s all a fabrication, written entirely for the joke.

It is glorious.

The book also differs from the film in a few ways, but for the most part, it is a perfect adaptation, and in my humble (correct) opinion, many of the little changes in the film are actually better.

Now, how do I make this marvel of a book about myself?

These splits between the author’s fictional life portrayed as real, the comical cuts with his voice – at one point he interrupts the story to say ‘me again’ – made me realise truly for the first time that a novel could be so much more than just the story on paper. It was so clever, so wonderfully weird and strange that it just made me think about Books in a whole new way. They didn’t need to be confined to plot beats and story structures. They didn’t need to follow any rules or formulas. They could and should be completely unrestrained creative freedom.

I write horror; my books are serious and though I may slip in some silliness, they’re far from comical. But what I took from reading The Princess Bride for the first time, that story could be so much more than just the words, has been foundational in everything I’ve ever written since. Every time I do something I know breaks the ‘norm’ or my readers just might not get, I know it all comes from reading that wonderful, mad book. It was the book that made me want to write. It is so special to me.

Aaaaaand that copy was donated to charity (not by me!) so I don’t even have it anymore. But I hope it gave someone else a right good laugh and they love it as much as I do.

God, this has lasted forever.

500 days since I started to remember The Violences. 500 days of flashbacks, every single day.

It’s an achingly long time.

But as I reach this awful milestone, I want to reflect a bit. I wrote about when I reached 400 days before, and I was in such a dark place. I was spiraling all the way down and couldn’t get up. So goddamned often throughout this, I wondered if I’d ever move on, at least enough to feel like me again.

And as I hit day 500, I think I’m there.

Or, at least as close to there as I’ve felt this whole time.

I don’t really know when it happened, but there was a day recently where I just felt like me again. I didn’t feel broken or empty. Didn’t feel like a consciousness trapped in a cracked shell. I felt like me.

Albeit a me with significant mental health issues. I still have PTSD and that’s not going anywhere. I still get triggered to the point I shut down for days at a time. I still have almighty breakdowns where I am this feral version of myself. Still have nightmares, chronic sleep deprivation, hypervigilance. All that good stuff.

But those are just symptoms. They don’t consume me like they used to. They’re just things in my life to manage. They aren’t the sum of my parts.

I found early in this process, when the memories were fast and fierce and awful, that I couldn’t find any real accounts about what this part of recovery was like. Most people just said, “it was hell for years, but then I learned to cope.” It was one of the main motivators for deciding to write openly about my experience, even if it is pretty awful to do so (I historically haven’t loved opening up on private stuff like this, but I’m pushing through!!)

I also desperately wanted anything concrete at all I could cling to of when it would be over. Obviously, nothing could possibly say. But at 500 days, I think I have my answer.

At 500 days, I think I’m okay. And I think when I say I’m okay now, I actually mean it.

How many special people change?

How many lives are livin’ strange?

Where were you while we were getting high?

I’m not usually an Oasis fan. Don’t think I’ve ever actively listened to it, just absorbed them from movie soundtracks, adverts, radio.

My mother took us to the cinema yesterday. Me, my dad, her, and a brother. My other brother sadly couldn’t come, and an Adidas ad all filmed around Oasis concerts came on. Lasted an age, very artistic. It’s wormed into my brain and taken root.

Today, we had plans to hang out. But she has to go to oncology first.

She gets a call. My brother has been asked to model for Adidas. She laughs. Her three children: an artist, an author, and now a model. She’s done well, we remark. Given us those artsy genes. We both avoid wondering what my son may be when he’s older, knowing she won’t see it.

She gets called for checks. Then we wander cluttered halls to get her bloods. The hole in her arm bleeds too much. But this was a success, less crimson than usual.

I follow her around. Jokingly escorting her arm-in-arm. I say she’s such an old lady now she needs the extra help. She doesn’t, but we laugh anyway.

We return. We sit in a crowded waiting area, not enough seats. There’s a weight on everyone sitting here. We watch nurses as they come, listening for her name being called, but it isn’t.

She tells me all this waiting is such a hassle. There’s a cafe nearby. I can get breakfast – she’s remembered I said I forgot to eat this morning.

She’s crafted a ruse.

I ask if she wants anything. Say I’ll be right back with coffee. She says, “oh, no, you’ll be waiting for ages. Just go grab something and I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

I understand. I go. I get coffee, no appetite. I go for a walk, a smoke. I wait. I listen to Champagne Supernova on repeat.

She’s expecting bad news, doesn’t want me here for it. Wants to tell me in her words, with her soft voice. Wants to protect me from the worst. From her impending death. She won’t tell me how long is left, I know this. She’ll honey the bitterness of the details.

Time passes. I come back in, back to the cafe, so she knows where to find me. I wait. And I wait. I try not to cry, but looming death is a heavy shroud to shuck off. Watching each time the doors open, looking at everyone’s sad faces shuffle past. Some have no hair, some have aids to help them move. All have the same, tired look.

But still, I wait. Sitting in this cold cafe. She’s had cancer for a while now. It was never going to be a good outcome. I’m always expecting the worst and brace for it, but it still always hits me hard. My only hope is she can hold out just a little longer, until my son, her only grandchild, starts his first day of school. It’s all she’s hoped to achieve this whole journey. I’m clinging onto it, knowing it’s days away. Knowing if we reach it, it won’t be long thereafter till she rests.

I’ve never known my mum at rest. She’s a woman who hates to idle. Hates to feel air under her feet. Likes to move. Likes to work. The hollow she’ll leave will scream. The silence of her will be too loud to bear.

Today, though, she’s still here. So we’ll still chat. We’ll still laugh. We’ll still be as daft as ever. And while I wait for her to come back, while I sit in this abysmal cafe, I’ll keep filling her void with music that’s too loud, because the quiet of her absence, even this temporary one, is unbearable.

The conversation I hear while I lie alone early morning. I lie alone a lot. Have spent far too much time trapped in this bed, hounded by flashbacks. Which is what was happening when my husband brushed my hip in such a way that caused me to recoil and thrash and throw his hand off me, then shut down.

This is my reality. It’s not even 8am and already I’m starting on a wrongness.

I still can’t bring myself to get out of bed, no matter how much I hate being chained to one. It’s ironic. A bed is where the worst things in my life have happened, and that’s not just assault. I suffered pain once so brutal I was losing consciousness.That was on a hospital bed, but I digress a little.

I am sick. Not just mentally, for which I am incredibly unwell. But physically, internally. I have sore, weak joints, an autoimmune condition, battled long-covid for a number of years, and more. I spend more time in a bed than most. More than I ever want to.

But these days, despite the fact that I am forced to swirl the memories of the worst of my life when I’m at rest, I can’t get up. When it was it’s worst, I wouldn’t leave bed till 4pm.

My bed is safe. My bed is warm. It’s a weight that’s comforting, not one of a body on top of me, crushing me, snatching the air from my lungs.

I can’t be hurt here, yet when I’m here, I only remember the hurt.

Some days I work from here. Laptop on my knees, camera off for team meetings. I often skip meals so I have no reason to leave before my son returns from daycare. My presence inside my home reduced to this small corner where it’s safe, calm, still.

I want to live my life. I want to get up, go for a walk in the woods, make food that nourishes, feel sun on my skin, move my body I’ve worked so hard these last months to make mine, clean my home, care for myself.

Exist in the world.

Instead, I am here. Stuck.

Frozen in a time and place from a life long since gone that I have only just known.

I have suffered with depression my whole life, but this feels new. So new, in fact, I did not recognise it as depression until it had swallowed me whole and I had to confront the fact that my thoughts were a swirl of violence towards myself I could barely keep quiet. It has been almost 14 months now, stuck in this way, caught between functional and unable to breathe.

The reality is, my past was so violent, so ‘psychologically damaging’ as the textbooks say, that I couldn’t survive living it, so didn’t. Repressed it for most of my life. Only learned it all again when on some strange subconscious level my mind knew I could cope.

And yet this, the most I could be able to cope with something as destructive as rape, has destroyed me. This whole time, since that first day I remembered, I have waited and longed for, begged for, a day when I’d feel normal and Me again.

I fear it’s never coming.

I fear every day until I am dead that I will constantly have to work to fix pieces of myself I did not break. That I will have to forever work to undo the damage inflicted by others.

But when I’m in bed, I don’t have to exist, so I don’t have to fix. I can simply drift, alive and safe. There’s no work to be done. No house to clean. No meetings to force my way through. No need to care for myself, to move my body I have felt trapped in my whole life.

Here, I can numb.

Though my thoughts dwell in those dark rooms people trapped me inside, I can float far enough from them to keep them from choking me.

I can drift in and out of broken, dreamless sleep. I can find a reprieve, a break from the pain which hurts and endures like nothing I have ever known.

While I rest, under covers and cushioned by softness, I don’t have to face the world. Don’t have to face the fact that my mother is dying and will have to tell my son who adores her. I don’t have to face people triggering me, being too loud or too close. Don’t have to face the looks I get from the scarce people in my life who know my story. Don’t have to put on a smile and pretend all is well. Don’t have to flinch from the world.

And yet, I long for who I was. A Shauna who took up space, who moved, who was alive. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet her again, but I miss her desperately. I think she died a very long time ago, when she was all of Six, but she managed to keep the wound held together long enough and has only bled out once she finally felt safe. Now I am what’s left, and I cannot stem the flow.

My life will never be mine, not in the way it should have. I will never know the joy of decisions all my own, not tainted by awful hands.

Every choice, every movment I’ve made has been influenced by what that grown man did to me in that dark room when I was a child, would continue to do to me, what all those boys who wanted a piece of me took, what the one who drugged me took most of all.

But I live in the hope that maybe one day, one morning I am not expecting, I rise from my bed and it is easy. I hope that one day I don’t hide myself away from life and living. I hope that one day I can exist again, where it isn’t an effort to do so.

And maybe, on that day, I can finally live a life that’s mine, all mine, and not what others have made it.

It has been four hundred days.

Four. Hundred. Days.

Four hundred days since I started to remember what you did. Since the memories of you I locked away came back with fervor.

Four hundred days I’ve remembered your taste, your touch, your voice and words, your smell.

Four hundred days you’ve lived in my head vividly. With me in the mornings when I wake. Smothering me at night when I try to sleep.

I imagine there was a boy once who would have delighted at knowing that I had thought of him this much, for this long, again and again. But you’re a man now. Or maybe a monster. It’s hard to know through the veneer of the life you’ve curated.

Tell me, my haunting, how does it feel to know you live with me so? That all these years later, you got exactly what you wanted, just not in the way you’d hoped?

I wonder how often in four hundred days have you spared me a thought? Do I live with you as you live with me? Do our thoughts and memories dance to the same song in different, lonely halls?

I wonder if you dwell on it, how much space I take within you? What shape of me you hold?

Do you remember my taste on your tongue? My words in your ear?

Do you remember my screams? My tears? My pleading? My warring?

Do you remember me bare, helpless, swiping thrashing and fighting you until the end? Or has it twisted and coalesced into something you tell yourself was never that bad? Never that evil?

Maybe something even special.

I can guess you’ve wondered many times how much space you take up within me. If I remembered, how much or how little, what I thought of you. And I imagine you’d want to know where I stand now.

But you don’t get the privilege.

You don’t get to know me now as you once caught a glimpse of. I’m as loud and as open as I was then. Louder, even. It doesn’t take a whole lot to get to know me in my fullness.

But you won’t have the delights.

You had me once. One night where it was true and unrestrained. Until you tore it apart with your clumsy fists. That’s all you get of me.

But I know you.

I saw the real you. The one you never wanted anyone to see. The one you let yourself be when you thought no one was looking.

Over the last four hundred days where you’ve festered in my thoughts and wormed your way through me again and again, I’ve come to know you a great deal. I see who you are. You’ll never know the trueness of who I am. This is the closest you’ll ever get.

Better savour it.

Not to be too much of a downer right off the bat, but finding an agent or publisher willing to take a chance on your story in this day and age has never been harder. There’s more writers than ever before, more people work from home, so have more time to chase their hobbies. People have more access to resources, and therefore, competition is fierce.

But the good news is that there’s also more agents than ever before!!

So let’s talk a little on how to get one.

A Finished Product

Because publishing is fiercely competitive, agents are strict about the rules of publishing. This includes making sure your book fits the word count for your age and genre. Despite what some online say, you absolutely do not have to have it edited professionally. But you do need to have your manuscript in as good a shape as possible. Beta readers and critique partners are excellent for this. Agents don’t need a flawless book, so don’t worry about typos, but the closer to complete you can get it, the more likely your chances of an offer.

You also want to have a synopsis on hand. Ideally, no more than 2 pages long, and the more concise, the better.

The Sales Pitch

In order to have an agent or publisher consider your book, you have to query them. For the vast majority who don’t have a connection in the industry, we have to cold query. There are many resources to show how to make a good sales pitch but generally, start with a short introduction, maybe include a line on why you think the agent may be a good fit. Add a couple of hundred-word blurb like you’d find on the back of a book, then a paragraph with two or three comparison titles—ideally published in the last five years and in the same category (genre + age group). This is tricky, but the easiest way to do it is to think about books that would be beside yours on a bookshelf in a store. They don’t have to be a direct parallel. You can pick an element, so maybe you say a setting similar to another book, a character trait or journey, a general vibe or sub-plot, magic system, etc. It makes for a stronger query if you can talk about how element X is similar to your book, rather than a direct comparison.

Lastly, add a little bio. If you don’t have qualifications or experience (many of us don’t) include a little about yourself, your interests, your day job. Anything at all, the point is to show an agent you’re a human! You’ll (hopefully) be getting into a partnership with them and that’s always easier when the two of you get on well.

For the whole query, keeping it as small as possible is best. Agents know some books need a little more space, but aiming for a ballpark of 500 words is a good zone. If it’s too long or muddled, agents may get the impression your book will be too, and they may not even open it.

Your query is to give them reasons to open your book; the book’s job is to get them to stay till the end.

The Hunt For An Agent

There are a bunch of websites and resources to help you find an agent. Find ones who represent your genre and age. Don’t try to fling your book to someone who is closed to your genre or age. They won’t take it, and honestly, won’t appreciate you coming to them as it shows you can’t follow the instructions or rules, and might make them wary of working in a partnership with you. On that, agencies and publishers have different querying rules, so be sure to read their instructions thoroughly. Once you’ve got your list, you’re ready to send.

A thing to note: most agents do not appreciate double queries from the same author while one is still active, or querying another agent at their agency. Agents also fall behind sometimes, and you may need to nudge them so you're not forgotten. So have some way a record of the agent and the date you queried.

The Great, Agonising Wait

No lies, this bit sucks. And there’s a reason they’re known as the querying trenches. It can take months and months of silence, and tens and tens of rejections. There used to be a general advice of sending ten queries at a time and if you don't get any direct or personalised feedback, it's a sign to adjust your query. But there’s debate on if this still works given how different the landscape is now. The old rules to show things are working do not necessarily still apply. It’s impossible to measure success, but generally, if you’re only getting form rejections (generic emails with no direct feedback) it will not hurt to go back to your query and tighten it.

While you wait, working on the next project is advised. But I also want to say it’s just as if not more important to do real life stuff too. Indulge in hobbies, exercise, socialising. Just anything that takes you away from the publishing stuff because that still will mess with your mental health so quick. Make sure you take care of You during this time.

General Tips

Now for a little list of things to hopefully help you in the trenches:

• For your blurb, try to focus on the Big Ticket plot things. Don’t tell the agent about too many themes or why you wrote it, they can learn all that as they read or on the offer call. Keeping your query short, sharp, and clear increases your chances.

• Your blurb should reflect your writing voice; you have space to get creative with it.

• But your synopsis should be all business. Give away plot twists! Don’t hold secrets that you want the agent to find as they read. For the synopsis, they need to see you know how to structure and present a whole story.

• Capitalise character names the first time you use them in the synopsis; thereafter, write them normally.

• Agents see hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts a year. Your query is to get them excited enough to read more. One tip is to write out your favourite bits of the book and use those as the main points in the blurb.

• You do not need to tell an agent why your book would fit them, but it is a great place to tell them about extra elements you don’t have space for in the query. If one agent says they love a grumpy sunshine dynamic, but you can't make that fit in the blurb, you can explicitly address that and say, “from your MSWL you might like this because of x,y,z element.”

• On that, MSWL stands for Manuscript Wish List. You can sometimes find these on their agent page, Twitter, or websites (details below).

• Read. This probably feels silly, but there are many authors out there who do not read. Read widely. Read books in your genre and age. See what others are doing successfully and what you do and don’t like. Reading is the single best homework for you as an author.

• Agents find it difficult to sell previously published books, including self-published. Please keep this in mind if you come across rejections because of this.

• Given not everyone makes their pronouns visible, it’s a safer bet to address an agent/editor by their full name as opposed to a prefix.

• Be wary of contests or services that charge money to “boost” your query and be sure to research before paying. Many reputable services or contests exist, but so do scams.

• An agent/publisher should never charge you to read your work. If they ask for money up front, run. Check if they’re listed in QueryTracker, Publishers Marketplace, or have verifiable sales.

• All this advice is applicable to publishers that allow direct submissions, too.

Helpful Sites

• A query letter template created and shared by agent Samantha Wekstein.

• PubTips, a Reddit page on all things publishing, with many in the industry commenting on posts and authors sharing query letters and their publishing journeys.

• MSWL, which curates agents and editors who have used #MSWL (manuscript wishlist) on their social media. This is for calls to specific things agents and editors are looking for.

• Manuscript Wishlist, which is more broad, and a site where editors or agents update profiles directly, and will include more details on genres, age ranges, tropes, etc.

• Query Shark takes real queries submitted by authors and comments on what is and isn't working in their pitch.

• QueryTracker is probably the largest online database of agents and the system many use to receive queries.

So there it is. Have I missed anything? Did you have any tips of your own that helped you get through the trenches? Have your own success stories? Or anything you’d like to know more about, or topics I can delve into more detail on? I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions!

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As with all complex stories worth telling, there's a lot to this one. But I'll keep it as condensed as I can.

For anyone who hasn't read my previous posts, in May last year, memories of a decade of sexual violence I'd repressed started coming back. The first memories were that of a boy who had drugged and raped me while I was paralised but still concious when I was 16 years old.

It. Was. Hell.

You can read about that here if you wish, but I knew very early I would write about it in some way. My go-to when I don't want to cope with life is to write. The first story I wrote was me being chased in my house by a monster. I was about seven and wrote it shortly after my abuse started (keep in mind, it was all unknown to me and repressed). That monster resembled my attacker.

I have written my horrors on pages forever, before I knew about them. Once I remembered it again, it tore me open when I realised how many of my experiences and how much of those two monsters I'd written. At the beginning of May, I finished the first draft of a novel. It was an exceptionally ambitious project with a stupid premise. I cried writing the end and didn't know why. It was a couple of months later when I wanted to tackle edits that I saw that the whole book was me working through what that boy had done to me at sixteen. He'd wormed his way into every book. Every project. The things I'd created had his fingerprints all over them. He'd taken my body, my voice, my heart, my life. And my books. The things I made all by myself.

He fucked those too.

It was the day that I found him, around 5 weeks into remembering, that I knew I was going to write the novel.

I hadn't ever forgotten that boy, but I never thought about him. My thoughts would slide off that night if ever I got too close to thinking about it. So when I remembered what he’d done, I remembered him with piercing, shattering clarity. I couldn't find any trace of him online at first, until one morning, when I realised I'd been spelling his surname wrong in my searches.

And there he was.

For the sake of his privacy, not that he deserves any, I won't share the specifics. But who he is now felt in every way like he was twisting the knife deeper into what he'd done to me. Seeing his life, his wife, his job. Family who adored him, thought of him as a great man. Colleagues who praised him, called him a rare sort of gentleman. The scarce information I could glean of him all in some way felt like an insult, like he was taunting me. I don't think he could have ended up in a more insulting field of work.

The rage consumed me.

I'd had to write about what he'd done to me all these years without realising it. So I knew for damn sure I was going to do it on my terms this time. While he'd thrived and become successful throughout all those years, I'd struggled to make it to the end of the day. Seeing all of this, seeing who he was to the public and knowing who he was in secret, it lit me with the most anger I'd ever known, and nothing in the fucking world was going to stop me from taking all that hurt and injustice and turning it into art.

I was going to write about the gritty, brutal, destructive truth of survival in a horror, because there's no better genre for something like this. I also knew that same moment I was set on writing it (I can remember it so clearly, I was walking alone in a park with my thoughts festering) that if I was doing this, I was going to use my voice to tell this story for other survivors. They're my main audience. I was going to lay out exactly what the hell of surviving really is with brutal honesty, though in a way to be protective of readers. So they're seen but not hurt by my words.

But also, I wasn't going to alienate everyone else. The story had to stand alone for what it was and be accessible to anyone who read it. I spent time planning how I could possibly make this work, and once I had a plan, I told my agent. Told her my goals and ambitions for this book, to make a horror where the themes are blatantly about surviving rape but for any reader who didn’t know this before going in, they'd still get a complete and eerie tale in a crumbling seaside town. My agent agreed and let me drop all my other commitments immediately.

Then I got to work.

I wrote the novel at a dizzying speed. I rarely slept or did anything except write. I was meticulous in the crafting of the novel like I never had been. Kept detailed spreadsheets I updated as I wrote so I could balance the themes and metaphors to keep them sharp, ensure the plot was robust and worked on its own without relying on allegory to get the point across, and worked tirelessly to get my prose the most beautiful I was capable of. If I was writing about something so ugly and so awful, I wanted each page to feel intentionally crafted and artful.

I finished the book quickly. Sadly, it was while drafting that the memories of younger abuse came to me. So I wrote harder and more obsessively to give my brain some kind of break from my own nightmares. It was a good distraction. The only one I had because as soon as I stopped and went to bed, I'd be haunted by that Boy again.

I wanted to blend the strangeness of folk horror and the feeling of being isolated and lost with the psychological collapse of eldritch horror, which is one of the most famous monster genres of all time, because there are few people more monstrous than rapists.

It is fiction, it is separate to me, as are all the characters and their journeys. It is heavy on allegory. But it was born from my own experiences.

The book went on submission to editors at publishing houses January 2025, exactly as I had written it. My agent couldn't find a thing to fix or edit, so it went out as was. We had some incredible feedback, very kind interest. But unfortunately, the book didn't find a home quickly. It was either too literary for the genres I'd woven in there, or they were building lists for things more accessible or with broader appeal. None of the rejections were about the book, more about the editor not being able to place it on their list.

The book went out for a second round of submissions in early April.

By that time, though, I'd given up hope. My mental health had collapsed so completely after months of fighting to keep it together that I had nothing left to give. I actually quit publishing and writing because I was so broken by everything and needed to withdraw.

Within 4 weeks of round 2, we had an offer.

When my agent called me to share the news, I sobbed for hours. And I was completely sold on the press. They were one I'd admired for years and one I suggested we send the book to. Before we went on sub I had said to my agent I'd rather we tried indies as I prefer them a lot of the time to be honest! But in this industry, you have to let everyone else know, do negotiations, etc. In that negotiation period, a lot of exciting things happened, but I was already saying to my agent I didn't want an auction, I didn't want to negotiate other offers, I was already decided.

Washed Away By The Sea will be my debut novel. My first entry to the book world will be a literary rape horror. I never once could have predicted this was the way my life would go. But if this is where my authoring career were to stop, with this book and this one only making it to print, I'd be fine with that. It's the book that matters the most of any I've written. I know it lands and connects with survivors and general readers alike. I know I pulled it off. Nailed the absolute shit out of that book.

I'll likely share excerpts and more about the story in the future, but for now, I'll leave you with the blurb, and I hope you enjoy.

Samantha Passmore’s shadow has followed her, twitching and coiling, for ten years.

Ever since she survived an attack by an unspeakable beast hidden in a dark cove on Hoal beach. But that monster was impossible. It couldn’t have been real. It couldn’t have torn her apart and feasted on her insides. So the truth lay buried, pushed to the dark reaches of her mind.

Sam returns to the village a decade on for her grandfather’s funeral. But being back, being so close to the place she shouldn’t have survived, jars loose memories she’s desperate to keep lost at sea. As she's plagued by truths she can’t make sense of and doesn’t want to, the town mirrors her torment: animals are gored, locals turn strange and obsessive, and there’s something dripping in the water. Something floating in the eyes of the villagers.

Something following Sam.

The only way to escape the nightmare unfolding around her is to face what really happened on that beach when she was sixteen, even if it threatens to drown her.

Washed Away By The Sea, coming autumn 2026, with Quill & Crow.

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