Hello readers,

We’re now approaching year 2 since I started writing Sanctifiction: The Darkness at Home, a paranormal horror about a detective who believes he killed a woman that doesn’t exist. The story dives into a world of dark rituals, cultists, demon worshippers, and possessions.

“A tale of resurrection guaranteed to rot your soul!”

TDAH was inspired by a nightmare I had where my air conditioner wouldn’t turn off even after I had unplugged it and my wife was scared of going in the basement.

I was able to cobble the rough draft in about a week to two weeks where I only wrote down the nightmare. Then it took me a few months to expand the nightmare into a story that included the detective.

My goal was to write a short story or a novella. But as I wrote in the detective, I found myself struggling to explain how he fit into the overall story. The concept of Sanctifiction was for me to write episodic short stories similar to the X-Files or a tv series. This is also called a serial. What I quickly discovered was that my inexperience in short fiction made it impossibly hard to condense The Darkness at Home into a novella. There were too many unanswered questions that are normally answered in a fiction book but rarely answered in an episodic story.

This is usually why the pilot episode of a new series tends to be longer than the half hour episodes that come after it.

As I added more content, the story grew bigger… and bigger… and bigger, until finally I finished a draft and sent it over to my editor. Well, my editor is a horror junkie, and she had lots of notes where I didn’t quite capture all the tropes expected in horror. As I read through her notes and re-read my own work, I realized my scary book was boring. It spilled out of the novella format and sat in the weird border between novella and novel.

My episodic short story idea wasn’t going to work for this book because I wanted to cover more than a murder.

I was frustrated because I had already paid for the cover artwork (thank you Matt Seff Barnes!) and was eager to get this published in October of 2025. If it had only been a story about one case, I could’ve made that work. But because the detective was also trying to solve the murder of his wife AND crack a case with supernatural elements, there was no way to make the story short. It also didn’t help that I didn’t know who my detective was and I had trouble connecting with him on a personal level. The names I chose for him didn’t fit with him, his culture, or his background.

What about his wife? The key tagline was that he murdered someone that didn’t exist. Yet, the case presented to him didn’t cover any of this mystery. We only hear about his wife during a long expository dump at the beginning of the story, some references in the middle, and that’s it.

All the parts that I thought were scary, my editor said was boring. My detective lacked agency and the stakes were too low. I needed help brainstorming solutions and called my friend, Ari who was working on her own book The Blessed (from what I’ve read, the prose is amazing)!

Ari told me what I had suspected. The story wanted to be bigger than I was allowing it to be. She provided some great insights and ideas on what I could do to expand the story. Unfortunately, that set me back to square one.

Rewrites are the bane of my existence and the most grueling part of the writing process.

I hate rewrites. I hate rewrites so much, I would rather create an outline than suffer through a rewrite. I’d rather erase my entire book and start from scratch than open an old document and rewrite my story. Unfortunately, rewrites are where the magic happens. Rewrites are the reason awful books become memorable. My problem with rewrites is that I often don’t know how to fix the problems.

As a pantser, my default writing process is to fly by the seat of my pants. When I am struck with inspiration or know there aren’t any consequences to what I write, I can bang out drafts in one to two weekends. When I didn’t have readers or an audience, maaaan. I could write anything with the celerity of The Flash. I used to be PROUD at how quickly I could write a sixty-thousand-word story.

Once you’re a published author and readers have expectations, everything changes. Now those plot holes I conveniently ignored mattered because they were affecting continuity. They weren’t small things either like how Todd McFarlane’s Spawn cape was either too huge or too small. These were major holes that broke the story.

I needed to reassess what TDAH was and figure out the why.

Writing horror for the first time was like flying a plane that was still being built.

Everything I knew from writing The Silver Ninja did not help me in the horror genre. The only part that was sort-of horror related was when Cindy first gets the suit and her body transforms into the bulkier, meaner version of herself. Other than a brief body horror scene, TDAH was completely different from Silver.

I could have gone the easy way and written TDAH in the style of Resident Evil, an action horror game. But I didn’t want my detective to shoot at ghosts or zombies. It was important to me that Lucas (formerly Alvin, formerly Scott) didn’t fight at all. Maybe throw a punch, maybe tackle someone, but not fight. He’s a pacifist. Cindy’s my fighter.

To write horror I picked up some books, watched some movies, and traveled to places where I could get some inspiration. I also went back to the basics and started scribbling in my notebook. I’ve found that writing in a notebook has been a great way to free myself from writer’s block. The freewriting does wonders for my brain and let’s me troubleshoot issues with my story before I go back to writing. I could write anything without having to figure out how it fit in the story. Any ideas that worked, I’d copy over into my word document.

So, how far along is The Darkness at Home?

As of this writing, Sanctifiction sits at 53,000 words with 20 fully written chapters. The goal was 80k but I’m not sure there’s enough content to sustain the book without padding. A lot of the key plot elements are wrapping up and I’m afraid that further expansion will lead back to boring content.

I’m going to be a little disappointed if we don’t at least hit 70k but I’m also not going to stretch out the story for the sake of page count. With the way printing costs are rising, it is no longer financially viable to print out short stories or novellas. If I do move forward with episodic content, they will most likely be e-book only until I can write enough to put into an anthology.

No finalized plans yet.

Is The Darkness at Home releasing this year?

I had written something else but am now changing it before you see this go live on my website. I am scheduled to work with a brand new editor in September. Therefore, my revised draft needs to be completed in August. The scramble is on.

Will I be done in time for an October book tour? I honestly don’t know. There is so much work that goes into prepping the book and printing it out in time for a book tour. Even if I were to get the edits done, there might be a delay in shipping.

I think the E-book will be available this year, but the print version remains TBD. We’ll see what happens!