A Mother’s Torment follows a mother going through a divorce who moves back to her parent’s home and encounters supernatural elements and family secrets. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Spoilers ahead!

In 2018 I came down with some sort of bug. Over the course of a week, I got maybe 3 or 4 hours of sleep in total. During this time, my wife and I were watching a lot of The Dead Files on the Travel Channel. This blended with an HGTV show we’d watched about a New York family that had converted an 18^th Century National Guard armory into a home. The characters grew from there; a mother and daughter who were both being influenced by the supernatural forces present on the property.

I mixed in a few things that’s stuck with me since childhood. The first was the disappointment watching the original Scooby Doo series. I always wanted the monster to turn out to be an actual monster and not some old guy in a cheesy rubber mask. While I give the reader a scientific explanation at the end with the Munchausen by Proxy diagnosis, the narrative truth is that this character has always been trapped by the darkness that lives in the house.

And like Scooby Doo, the choice of Munchausen by Proxy was because of a childhood memory. I remember my parents watching a 60 Minutes or 20/20 story Marybeth Tinning in the eighties. I was 10 when she was charged with murder and 12 when she was convicted. The horrific allegations left a mark on my memory.

Your characters express a wide range of emotions and deep thought processes. Were you able to relate to your characters while writing them?

I was able to relate to them, especially June. I poured a lot of my own experience into the prologue where she attempts suicide. The method she chose and manner in how her attempt was interrupted may be different, but the temporary surrender to despair that she experiences is one that I’ve felt myself. Along with her propensity to self-mutilate.

In high school there was the “eraser test” of one’s manhood. You’d let a friend rub a pencil eraser on your arm and if you told him to stop before you were bleeding you lost. I don’t remember ever saying stop and came home with bleeding wounds from it. Fast forward to the mid-2000s when I was recovering from a serious bout of depression a new version was going around but substitute cigarettes for erasers. I had this need for an external expression of my inner pain, so the game evolved from others doing it to doing it myself. Thankfully, someone intervened and helped me put a stop to it.

When you first sat down to write this story, did you know where you were going, or did the twists come as you were writing?

When I started the story I knew both the prologue and epilogue; what I didn’t have was a middle. I jotted some ideas down in a chapter outline that was about 18 to 20 chapters. This gave me a map of possible causes and effects that would link the beginning with the end. Then as I began to write the first draft the magic of writing happened.

The characters developed into their own persons. I found myself stopping to think: “how would June act in this situation?” and “what would Lillian say when she wasn’t getting her way?” By the end of the first draft, my 18 to 20 chapters had expanded to just over 40 as the answers to the questions about how my characters would behave led me down some rabbit holes that expanded and enriched the story.

After the first draft was complete, I used my GI Bill to enroll in Emerson College’s online Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing MFA. There I would go through several drafts and end up writing an entirely new second act that introduced the character of Sara-Lyn. Which introduced a whole new set of twists and turns along with even more complexity and depth. The workshop and editing experience of this novel impressed upon me how much of a collaborative effort good storytelling and writing is.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

It’s a novel titled Pea Ridge and it’s based on a trilogy of stories I wrote with the same title for the creepypasta podcast Fear From the Heartland. My pitch for the novel:

What if, after being stranded on an alien world, a mother’s son is killed by a creature that should’ve been her prey?

Familiar gray aliens are relocating semi-sentient creatures from a dying world. These creatures hunt based on telepathic connections—think A Quiet Place but with emotions. On their way to an interstellar wildlife preserve, their ship crashes in rural Missouri. There they are unleashed on the human population who transmit strange new emotions such as anxiety, depression, and guilt. They can no longer distinguish between physical illness and emotional distress. So, if you’re feeling sad or stressed, you’re on the menu.

I don’t have a firm release date in mind at the moment. I’m going to query two agents I met at the 2023 Between the Pages Writers Conference in an effort to get this novel traditionally published. This could push publication to 2025 or 2026. However, if I don’t get representation I’ll publish it in late 2024 or early 2025.

During this time I’ll also be focusing on writing for Fear From the Heartland and maybe starting a YouTube channel.

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