I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember — not the casual kind, but the kind who devoured books in days, who lived entire lives between chapters. I grew up wandering through Anne of Green Gables, stumbling through Shakespeare, and then, as I got older, tumbling headfirst into The Vampire Diaries and Stephen King.
It’s funny: I’ve always been afraid of the dark, yet reading about dark things made the shadows feel less threatening. Maybe that’s where this all began — learning that stories could turn fear into something I could hold, examine, even understand.
My reading life shifted again when I discovered romance novels. For a while, I fed that longing for perfect love, for the kind of devotion that sweeps you off your feet. But as much as I enjoyed them, they didn’t ignite my imagination the way fantasy did. Dragons, knights, magic — those worlds lit something in me.
And then I found The Noble Dead Saga by Barb Hendee. A perfect fusion of fantasy and horror. When I finished the series, I felt a genuine grief — the kind you feel when you lose a friend. After that, nothing else measured up. I drifted away from reading for a while, not because I didn’t love stories, but because I couldn’t find the ones that made me feel that alive.
Then The Walking Dead premiered.
I wasn’t a horror‑TV person. I wasn’t into gore. But that show grabbed me by the collar and didn’t let go. I watched everything connected to it — every spin‑off, every movie, every dubbed version of anything remotely zombie‑adjacent. It cracked something open in me.
But zombies weren’t my only obsession. I’ve always loved sci‑fi — Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Alien, Predator. I inhaled those worlds. Still, even then, I never thought to write my own.
I wrote when I needed to survive something — when our dear friend died, I wrote him notes on Facebook. When my heart broke, I wrote in my journal. Writing was a lifeline, not a calling.
Then the world stopped.
During COVID, near the end of that suspended time, I lost both of my dogs to cancer — a year and a half apart. They were my shadows, my constants. Losing them hollowed me out. I didn’t know what to do with the grief, so I fostered puppies. I found myself giving them voices, narrating their thoughts, telling tiny stories just to make myself smile.
That’s when I realized: I had been telling stories all along.
On social media.
With Maya and Dexter.
With every dog who’d ever walked beside me.
The reason I didn’t know what to do with my grief was simple — my main characters were gone.
So I wrote a book.
It was messy.
It was raw.
It’s still on Amazon, because maybe someone grieving their pet will find it and feel less alone.
You might be wondering how that led me to writing a sci‑fi horror novel.
Be patient — I’m getting there.
After that first book flopped, my creativity and my grief were still looking for a home. At the same time, I hit a milestone I was completely unprepared for: perimenopause. My body changed. My brain fogged. I forgot things. I felt exhaustion I didn’t recognize. I thought it was depression from losing my dogs. I went to the doctor. I tried to make sense of myself.
And in the middle of all that, I decided to memorialize not just the dogs I had lost, but every companion who had shaped my life. I began writing a children’s series — one that awakened my immigration story, my roots, my identity.
But something else was brewing underneath.
A story that felt like it had been waiting for me.
A story about heritage and danger, family and love.
A story with representation and inclusion at its core. A story about a fiercely capable Latina and a crew of misfits from different worlds who build a family in the vastness of space — only to unleash a horror they never expected.
A story with humour and dread.
A love story with a man confident enough in himself to be soft, loyal, and emotionally brave.
A story that asks: Who survives when the universe turns on you?
I haven’t decided yet. But I know this: I’m writing it from the heart, with my readers in mind.
This is why I write at the edge of the possible — because that’s where fear becomes wonder, where grief becomes creation, and where stories become the bridge between who we were and who we’re becoming.
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