#1 A Brief History of Being Weird

Relaunching this newsletter with a consistent theme and frequent updates! Go me!

It may come as a shock to everyone, but I was not that great with keeping up with a newsletter this year. To be fair, there is a lot going on this year. Love and Other Conspiracies comes out in three months (panicking tbh), I’m working on edits for Book 2, and lots of exciting things happening for family and friends. So, it’s busy!

I found that I was using this newsletter as a bit more of a diary as I went through a lot of complicated feelings over the past year. While I did get a lot of lovely comments from people who enjoyed that, I think I can be more consistent if I have a tighter theme.

I was actually really inspired by Alicia Thompson’s the same songs over and over because she comes in every week with the coolest deep dives on music she loves and ties it into things she’s writing, feeling, doing etc.

If there is one thing I can do endlessly, it’s talk about weird shit.

So, that’s what we’re going to be doing here.

You can sit me down with a YouTube iceberg video (video essays where they cover a topic from most well known information to the most obscure) of ten hours of lost media, creepypastas, paranormal encounters, and I will be in heaven. I know more than the average person should about weird corners of the internet, unexplained events, and all things creepy and mysterious. Few things get me more excited when I realize I’ve found a rabbit hole I haven’t gone down yet.

I can attribute a lot of this to being an Aquarius, who are just naturally a little odd, love a good conspiracy theory, and all the astrology memes for them are about aliens or like… taking over the world.

I don’t know where it started, honestly. One early memory came from when I was like two, and we took a family vacation to Charleston, South Carolina, which if you did not know, is very haunted. We took a ghost tour there (which little me misheard as “ghost store”) and while I don’t remember any of the places we went, I do remember that by the end of the tour, I was crushed that we did not get to go to the “ghost store” and buy a ghost.

Other flitting memories include watching those old-school History Channel or Travel Channel documentaries like “Most Haunted Places in America” or “Top 10 Scariest” and used them to make a list of places I wanted to go. I asked my parents to take me to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia when I was like seven because all normal seven-year-olds want to go see pickled tumors and casts of conjoined twins.

One of my other favorites as a kid was the show Mystery Hunters that aired on Discovery Kids during their spooky Saturday night sleepover block. Teen hosts Christina and Araya traveled the globe looking for cryptids, ghosts, aliens etc. It was the first place I actually remember hearing about Mothman and El Chupacabra and clearly, those memories have stuck with me for a long time.

As I got older, and especially once I started writing in High School, there was a clear influence on my love for the unexplained. I liked to write high-stakes mysteries, monster-filled adventures, even some aliens tossed in there. It was very of the era (the 2010s paranormal YA boom). I always held onto the parts of me that loved a good rabbit hole, but it wasn’t until post-college that I realized “oh yes, this is my shit”

me, responding to ghost content

I got into shows like Expedition Unknown, Ghost Adventures, and Buzzfeed Unsolved. I played games like Uncharted where I was enraptured by uncovering lost things and unearthing mysteries. Once I hit a certain age where I realized I simply wasn’t cool and never would be, I got to enjoy the things I liked so much more.

Obviously, all of this has left such a mark on my writing. Love and Other Conspiracies comes from the parts of me that love the strange and unexplained, much like Hayden and what Hallie learns over the course of the book. My Book 2 (which I CANNOT WAIT) to talk about comes from my love of alien conspiracy theories and fascination with the alien boom of the Cold War. It’s got influence in my option books that I’m hoping to sell. It’s just so part of me.

And boy, do I know a lot of weird shit!

So, this new newsletter is going to tackle one weird thing each installment. Subjects will range from conspiracies and cryptids, to hauntings, to bizarre occurrences and odd corners of the internet. I can’t wait to take you all down the rabbit hole with me.

I will also provide updates, book recs, other general thoughts in these, too. There are going to be a lot of really exciting things happening over the next couple of months, including launch events, preorder campaigns, info about Romance Con etc.

Until then…