The seventh draft is done, and it’s time to stop making excuses. I’ve been writing a book, Called from Darkness, since I was about sixteen years old. It started with a nightmare I had while visiting my grandmother on her farm in rural North Dakota's Great Plains. I shelved it for a decade and came back to it about two years ago. I kept the characters and the major plot elements, but I fleshed it out into something deeper and darker than my sixteen-year-old brain could have

If you’re looking for the best books of 2025, here are my top five favorites! From dark academia to fantasy to commercial fiction, this past year was a true adventure. My reading goal for 2025 was 48 books, and I surpassed that, though I don’t actually know how many I read because at some point, I stopped tracking them on Goodreads. I'll share more about that later. Here are my top five reads of 2025. Technically, there are seven books on this list, but I don't think you can

Despite having been an avid reader for most of my life, it has only been recently that I've joined a formal book club. Last year, I was talking with one of my closest friends, who is also a bibliophile, and she mentioned she would like to form a book club. So we each invited a few friends, picked a book to read, and met at a brewery on Main Street. We read a book called Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani. It's based on the real town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, which isn't to

An author without books? I’ve written several books. They just haven’t been published yet. I wrote my first book when I was sixteen or...