layout: post title: “The Monster Who Makes the Call” date: 2026-06-02 —

I’ve been reading while I write. Not to steal ideas — to understand what I’m trying to do.

A Monster Calls made me cry.

At first I thought the boy was the monster. He’s arrogant, one-sided, unable to see anything from anyone else’s perspective. He keeps telling the tree that its stories are pointless, meaningless. He’s insufferable in the way that grief makes people insufferable.

But the real monster — the one who makes the call — is the truth. Or more specifically, the fear of acknowledging it. And it doesn’t just live inside the boy. It spreads. The adults around him keep looking away, sugarcoating, pretending. Even his mother refuses to die. She keeps suffering, keeps holding on, because she doesn’t want him to feel the pain of losing her. She waits until he finally tells the truth — the thing he’s been too ashamed to say out loud — and only then does she let go.

I finished the book and sat with it for a while.

Then I realized I’d been writing the same story.

Ava isn’t trying to fix her father because she’s brave or strong. She’s trying to fix him because the alternative — accepting that some things can’t be fixed — is the truth she cannot say out loud. Palagos, the dark presence that follows her, isn’t a villain. He’s everything she hasn’t been willing to feel yet. Fear. Guilt. Anger. Shame. All of it compressed into one terrifying shape because she hasn’t let any of it be separate and real.

The monster doesn’t come to destroy her. It comes because she called it, whether she meant to or not.

That’s what A Monster Calls understood that I’m still learning how to write.

Then the story finally clicked. The 3-act structure started working, the first two chapters came together, and somewhere in the middle of writing chapter two I realized — there needs to be a song here. Not because I planned it. Because the scene demanded it.

The scene is quiet. Ava’s father sits on the porch alone in the dark. Ava watches him through the curtains. Neither of them speaks. But they’re sharing something — the same sorrow, the same love, the same inability to reach each other across a distance that has no name. I needed music for that because words in a sentence weren’t going to be enough.

So I wrote one. I’m not a musician. I don’t write music. I can read very basic notation and that’s being generous. I’ve been taking opera classes for three years so I have a voice and some instinct for melody, and my teacher has agreed to write the notation once I figure out the tune. But right now I’m flying in the dark — humming into the void and hoping something lands.

The song is called Two Blue Hearts. It’s sung from the father’s perspective, about Ava, about the lake, about what he took from her without meaning to.

My daughter I see you wearing my green socks

Alone and hollow you follow my twisted past

My daughter you share my desperate blue heart

Twenty feet deep across my lonely sorrows

Adrifting broken tomorrows

My daughter your heart breaks my sinful sorrow

The wall of separate amidst our stitched paths

Reflections mirrored backwards through our cold dance

My roots search far and deep yet never get the chance

Without

My daughter

You wearing my green socks

I trapped your light, blocked by Baikal’s dream

It starts with a butterfly searching a meadow for a blue flower. She passes green grass, red tulips, frothy dandelions — refuses every one of them — until she lands exhausted on a marigold. She never finds what she was looking for. But she lands somewhere.

I don’t know yet if I’m the butterfly or the blue flower.

I have a writing tutor helping me keep the story’s structure honest and an opera teacher who will eventually turn my humming into something readable. Everyone around me is helping me build something I don’t entirely know how to build.

That feels right for this book.

layout: post title: “Text Is Art” date: 2026-06-02 —

6/2/26 — 10:00 AM — sunny, no clouds

I put the first two chapters into an AI voice today so I could listen to them. My mind processes audio better than text.

Text distracts me. To me it’s art. I look between the lines and see shapes — trees, eyes, veins, clouds. Especially handwriting. I look at the marks themselves, how a pencil leaves scratchy impressions on paper, how a pen leaves dollops of ink that sometimes smear when they’re fresh and you accidentally drag your hand across them.

Before I had a computer I had a very difficult time taking notes in school. It didn’t matter what information was on the page. The page itself was the thing I was looking at.

I’m writing a book. With text. That I can’t stop looking at like it’s a drawing.

layout: post title: “Trees Have Personalities” date: 2026-06-02 —

6/2/26 — 10:23 AM — still cloudless

I’ve always been interested in trees. They have different personalities.

In college I would go to the park and think about the trees dancing — especially the big oak ones. Like something was kicking its legs up into the sky and flailing its arms around in the air and just got stuck like that forever.

One day I was driving on the freeway and I swore the trees had freckles. Just little spots of interest scattered across them.

There’s a tree outside right now that looks particularly happy. Bold and shiny. Just the right size and shape — like it knew exactly what it wanted to be and became it without any fuss. Its leaves look like spinning pinwheels. Some of them are brown but they’re meant to be brown. Not wilting. Just decided.

And the little rose bush next to it — that one has freckles. Its flowers are like puckered lips blowing kisses to the birds.

layout: post title: “What Did I Get Myself Into” date: 2026-06-02 —

6/2/26 — 10:26 PM — clear night sky

Last night I wrote a song. One night. I sang it to my opera teacher this morning and she asked me to send it so she could turn it into sheet music.

Then it was night and I was alone and I panicked.

Not because anything went wrong. Because something went right. I sent the song. I sent the last scene of chapter two for context. I shared something I made with people who might take it seriously — and that’s a thing I have not done since 2002.

I used to draw and paint. Around 2010 it went completely stale and I stopped. I wasn’t looking for writing. I started singing a few years ago because it engaged my body in a way painting stopped doing, and somewhere in that process I started writing, and suddenly I could see painting again in a completely new way. And now there are songs arriving at night and a novel with a tutor giving me real notes and a blog documenting all of it.

I have no idea how I got here.

The panic last night wasn’t about the quality of the work. It was about stepping into a bigger identity than the one I was used to. Being someone who makes things and shares them like they’re worth something. That’s a strange feeling when you’ve spent a long time not doing that.

But I sent it anyway.

My tutor says the song is good backstory for Hector even if it doesn’t end up in the book. My opera teacher asked for it in writing so she could notate it. That’s not politeness. That’s people responding to work with action.

I’m still scared. But I sent it anyway.

I got the idea from a video game trailer. I don’t even play video games, but I follow the stories — it makes me feel younger. The trailer was for The Last of Us Part II. In it, the protagonist Ellie is shaking and twitching from a zombie bite, hallucinating about her father figure Joel, and then she looks straight into the camera and says: I’m going to kill every last one of them.

Throughout the entire first game, Ellie is immune to the infection. I was certain the twist of the second game was that she was never actually immune — that the violence, the killing spree, all of it was what it looks and feels like to lose your mind and become a zombie. To watch yourself turn from the inside.

When the game came out, that’s not what happened.

So I decided to write that book myself.

Originally Ava was going to be my guinea pig. She was going to get bitten. She was going to turn. The whole story was going to be about what it feels like to lose your mind from the inside.

But that’s not what my mind wanted to create. The further I got, the more the story resisted me. It kept pulling in a different direction, insisting on something else, something quieter and more specific and a lot more personal than zombies. Eventually I stopped fighting it and let the story become what it wanted to be.

And then I looked at what I’d made and realized: Ava is me. Jenn-Jenn is me. The mother holding everything together with both hands while nobody notices — also me. I went looking for an escape from reality and reality followed me in and sat down and refused to leave.

I didn’t want this book to have anything to do with me. Except it has everything to do with me. That’s why I’m writing it.