Mya is a romantic gothic historical novel about a centuries-old woman navigating Victorian medicine, buried folklore, and a dangerous love that forces her to imagine a future beyond mere endurance. What first came to you in writing Mya: the atmosphere, the character, or the central relationship?

It was the atmosphere first—always. I tend to see scenes before I understand them. Liverpool docks in the mist, damp cobbles, lamplight catching the edges of things. Once I have that, the character almost walks into it.

Mya followed naturally from that world. She didn’t arrive as a mystery to be solved, but as someone already carrying history—someone composed, controlled, and used to enduring rather than living. The relationship came later, but once William entered the picture, everything shifted. It stopped being about survival and became about the risk of wanting more than that.

How did you balance Victorian medical history with older folklore so that neither element overwhelmed the other?

I treated them both as systems people believe in. Victorian medicine, for all its progress, still had its blind spots and rituals. Folklore, on the other hand, has its own internal logic that’s been tested over centuries.

So instead of one explaining the other, I let them sit side by side. William approaches things with reason and discipline, while Mya carries something older that doesn’t need to be proven—it simply is. The tension between those two ways of understanding the world creates the balance. Neither cancels the other out, they just… coexist, sometimes uncomfortably.

Mya feels defined by discipline, intelligence, and grief rather than mystery alone. How did you shape her interior life on the page?

I didn’t want her to feel like a puzzle for the reader to solve. She knows exactly who she is and what she carries, so the writing reflects that. There’s no melodrama in her—everything is controlled, measured.

Her grief sits quietly underneath everything she does. It’s not something she expresses openly, but it informs her choices, her restraint, even her intelligence. She’s someone who has learned, over time, that emotion has consequences.

So instead of explaining her, I focused on how she moves through the world—what she notices, what she avoids, what she allows herself to feel and when. That tells you far more than exposition ever could.

Music, scent, texture, and silence all play a major role in the book’s emotional world. How consciously did you think about building the novel through sensation as much as plot?

Very consciously—but it’s instinctive at the same time.

I tend to write scenes as if they’re being experienced, not just observed. What does the air feel like? What can be heard just outside the frame? What lingers after someone leaves the room? Those details are what make a moment feel real.

Music plays a big part in that because it helps me find the emotional tone of a scene before I write it. Once I have that, everything else follows—the pacing, the rhythm of the dialogue, even the silence between lines.

For me, plot is what happens. Sensation is what makes it stay with you.

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