My personal anxieties came forth, despite my best efforts to transmute them into a different person—the main character, Rebecca. I had no time for world-building, so I had to pick familiar ground, both literally in terms of the world, and emotionally.

Personally, I’ve never read a story of a domestic violence survivor that gives the survivor what we so often feel that we want: What if our abuser just stopped doing that?

2024 by the numbers, and what that means for me in 2025.

Starting is not the hardest part.