Dear younger me,

You’re sitting on the floor again, surrounded by notebooks and half-empty mugs, wondering if any of this will ever mean something. You think you’re wasting your life chasing ghosts — stories no one asked for, dreams too big for the liminal space you exist in or the forever-failing body you’re trapped in. You don’t know it yet, but those words you scribble between pain and exhaustion are the first lifelines you’ll ever throw yourself.

You think you’re writing to survive because you are.

But one day, those same words will be the thing that saves you.

You’ll spend your years clutching notebooks filled with half-formed worlds and too-big feelings, wondering if anyone would ever understand the ache behind your words. You’ll write through pain, through heartbreak, through everything and every one that tried to convince you that this dream was too impossible, too far away or too frivolous.

You’ll carry rejection letters like scars. You’ll learn to balance grief with hope, loneliness with midnight bursts of creation. You’ll start to believe that maybe the story doesn’t want to be told. And then one day, it will demand to be.

And that story will be hers.

You don’t know her name yet, but she’ll come to you in a fever dream. A girl made of light and ruin. A body caught between heaven and hell. A heart too fragile and too furious to break quietly. And through her, you’ll start to make sense of the impossible thing you’ve always been trying to say: that sometimes the divine is born from the broken.

She’ll grow with you through every doctor’s appointment, through every dislocation and flare up, through every night you stare at the ceiling asking what the point of all this hurt is. She will become your language for pain and rage. She’ll be the reflection you needed when you felt monstrous. The reminder that even destruction can be a blessing.

There will be moments when you want to give up—when the exhaustion outweighs the hope, when the dream feels like a cruel joke. You’ll cry over blank pages and wonder if anyone will ever understand the world you’ve built out of pain. But you’ll keep writing. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only way you know how to stay alive.

And then one day, it will happen.

A message that says that someone would like to make your book a reality. You’ll read it over and over, half convinced it’s a mistake. But it isn’t. It’s real. The story you wrote in the dark will find its way to the light. The book that began as your heartbeat on paper will finally have a home.

Since you were kind enough to subscribe you get first dibs on the details (full details in the last image of this post)! I’ve sold a 2-book adult urban romantasy duology to HarperCollins Avon that blends the magical urban setting, a grief-driven heroine, and apocalyptic stakes of the MORTAL INSTRUMENTS series with the mystery of magical artifacts and forbidden supernatural romance of A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES. Interlaced with apocalyptic lore, a chronically ill heroine who is both vulnerable and vicious, and the kind of love that burns as much as it heals, THE LIGHT BETWEEN WOUNDS (book 1) explores grief, bodily autonomy, power, and the thin line between salvation and destruction as she becomes the unwitting target of demons who want to claim her, angels who want to destroy her, and a war that threatens to unravel the world—unless she unravels it first.

Thank you to every person who carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. The friends and family who reminded me to rest. The writing community that turned loneliness into belonging. The agent who whispered that my stories and words like mine mattered. This dream was never mine alone—it was built by every hand that reached out and said, keep going.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Survival isn’t a solo act. It’s a chorus.

When people hold this book, I hope they see the scars and the light. That they’ll feel the ache and the defiance. And maybe, just maybe, someone will find themselves in my characters the same way I did. Maybe a reader sitting on the floor, surrounded by their own notebooks and half-empty mugs, will see that even in the dark, even when it hurts, creation is a kind of resurrection.

And to that reader, all I can say is:

It was always worth it.

Keep writing. Keep loving too hard and dreaming too big. One day, you’ll wake up to find that the world you imagined finally exists outside your head. One day, you’ll open your inbox and realize the impossible happened.

The monsters you feared have become muses.

The girl who wrote to survive will become the woman who writes to live.

And she’ll get to share her story with the world.

With ink, light, and everything we survived,
Erynne