Category Archives: Into Shadow

Mental Illness in Into Shadow

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Anyone who has followed me for a while already knows that mental illness is a key part of my fantasy debut, Into Shadow, and my own struggle to accept my diagnosis of bipolar disorder was a major reason for writing it. Because today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing a deeper dive into mental illness in Into Shadow. 

On a recent reread of Into Shadow, my brother caught some references to mental illness in the book that I hadn’t expected anyone to pick up on. Today, I’m going to dive into those, as well as explore my representation of bipolar disorder within the book.

Bipolar Disorder

When I decided to write a protagonist with bipolar II, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be. I knew I wanted Wren’s inner struggle to relate somehow to bipolar disorder; I also wanted external plot events to be directly impacted by her mental illness. It was difficult to write partly because it was personal, but also partly because bipolar disorder is unpredictable and disruptive. There are things that make a manic episode more likely, but you can’t exactly plan for one. Just as manic episodes are never convenient in real life, writing it into this book was inconvenient. However, I came to embrace that this difficulty was a reality of the illness, and my way around this inconvenience was to make sure that while the manic episode Wren has is random, the consequences have a real impact on the plot. As a side note, the unpredictability of bipolar disorder was one of the things that I found hardest to accept about bipolar disorder; as someone who likes to have a plan, knowing that my plans can be disrupted at any time was a hard thing to accept, even if it has taught me to be better at accepting curveballs life throws my way.

My goal in having a character with bipolar disorder was not to “fix” the mental illness, but to have Wren learn to accept it better and live with it better. That, to me, is much truer to life. Medication can control mental illness to an extent, but it’s something you always live with. Curing it is not realistic, but adjusting to make space for mental illness in your life is.

There are so many facets to living with mental illness that make self-acceptance so difficult: there’s societal stigma, and there’s also, for me at least, a lot of guilt. I know seeing me struggle with mental illness has been hard on the people I’m closest to, and even if I know it’s not really my fault, I still carry that guilt with me.

One thing you may have noticed in Into Shadow is I was not brave enough to write Wren’s mania from another character’s point of view. This is partially because my experience with mania has always been personal, and it’s partially because I’m afraid. I’m scared to look up a video of someone being manic in case it causes me to feel shame. I’ve been told that hypomania is fun for the person experiencing it but scary for everyone else. I don’t want to see a video that will make me more afraid of myself.

I chose to focus on the mania side of bipolar disorder over depression in this book. Depression has always been a bigger struggle for me, but I focused on mania for several reasons. First, it was most relevant to me at the time. My medication was not quite right yet when I started drafting this book, and that meant I was getting manic a lot. Mania is also easier to write in some ways. If you haven’t experienced it, mania is a hard thing to describe, but it’s emotionally easier to deal with than depression. A big reason I chose to focus on mania over depression in this book is just because I find writing about depression, and especially the more severe symptoms of depression, to be extremely challenging for my mental health. I wanted to portray bipolar disorder accurately, but I also had to protect myself.

Wren from Into Shadow is a character I admittedly poured a lot of my own struggles into. Wren struggles with self-worth. She struggles with how to fit into a world that isn’t shaped for people with mental illness. She faces serious consequences for being mentally ill. As a result, this character is very special to me. I love her empowerment arc throughout this book, and my hope was always that other people with bipolar II might read this book and feel less alone. When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I needed a book like this to tell me that having an exciting life was possible, even with my new limitations. For that reason, this book is about bipolar disorder, and yet, it’s also not. It’s about a lot of things: dragons, politics, inequality, love. And I feel that’s as it should be. 

Self-Harm

This topic is a difficult one for me to write about, but I feel I can’t write about mental illness in Into Shadow without touching on it.

Into Shadow has a tally system for the Rooks. For each transgression, a Rook gets a line tattooed on their left forearm. This placement was very deliberate for me, because that’s where I have the majority of my self-harm scars. The most visible on my own forearm are three lines. However, I’m fortunate in that all of my scars are quite faint, and I would guess most people wouldn’t notice them. Of course, I notice them often.

I am not ashamed of my scars. For me, they show that I went through something awful and survived. Was self-harm the best coping mechanism? No. But I firmly believe it kept me alive through some of the worst years of my life.

I want to be clear that I do not condone self-harming. Anyone who has a history of self-harm knows that it’s an addiction. Once you start, it’s very difficult to stop, and it’s stupidly easy to relapse. Please don’t self-harm if you can possibly avoid it.

But while I’m not ashamed of my scars, there’s still something painful about looking at them. Every time I see them, it’s a reminder of horrible memories. It’s bad enough when something horrible happens, but to be reminded of it every time you look at your forearm is hard.

I think that’s why I made the decision to give the Rooks their tallies. It’s marking you forever with not only a mark, but also a bad memory. And while the harm in Into Shadow is societal harm rather than self-harm, there are some parallels to draw. My scars and the Rook tallies are both permanent marks of having survived something awful.

Initially, I wanted Wren to struggle with self-harm, and I even wrote some scenes featuring it. However, I ended up cutting those scenes because I didn’t want to trigger anyone who might have otherwise enjoyed the book, and I also didn’t want to romanticize it. Self-harm is not romantic. It’s ugly and difficult and painful. However, self-harm is also part of my journey, and that’s why these tallies made it into my book. 

Trauma

In addition to noticing the tallies/self-harm parallel, my brother asked me about Timothy’s torture. He wondered if it was a reference to PTSD, and the answer is yes, it was. As someone who struggles a lot with trauma triggers, it was very natural to make Timothy’s torture not physical, but mental. It made sense to me that the worst torture in the world is being stuck in bad memories and reliving them. 

I struggle a lot with trauma, and I’ve learned a lot about trauma as I deal with my own triggers. When you’re triggered, your body viscerally reacts and takes you back to how you felt at the time of the trauma. Of course, in Timothy’s case, I made it worse; his torture is to actually relive his worst memories. 

I don’t know if I consciously made Wren and Timothy represent different parts of mental health that I struggle with—bipolar disorder and trauma, respectively—but looking back, that’s exactly what they do. 

Conclusion 

Mental illness is complex and difficult. I can only speak to my own experiences with it, and that’s what I tried to do in Into Shadow. I’ll always be proud of this book because I put so much of myself into it. Mental illness is a hard topic to talk about and write about, and there’s still so much stigma around it. If I’ve helped lessen the stigma in any way, even for a few people, I consider this book a success. 

I tried to show that while people with mental illness have an extra hurdle in life, we’re also people with unique personalities and dreams, and we deserve dignity and respect. This is something I feel very strongly about, and I hope to continue to explore these ideas in the sequels for Into Shadow.

While this was a difficult post for me to write, it’s an important one. I’ve always felt that I can’t fight against societal stigma around mental illness unless I first combat my own stigma towards myself. It’s scary to post something so vulnerable, but I also think it can be necessary to be vulnerable about mental health topics.

Thanks for reading!

Published!

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I’ve now been a published author for over a week. Into Shadow released as an ebook on May 31, and the paperback released on June 7! (I now have a “Books” page on my website—check it out for links to the book, the synopsis, and content warnings.) It’s been an exciting month, and I thought I would share a little bit about what publication has looked like for me. 

May: The Month Before Publication

In May, I was unlucky enough to catch a bad cold that kept me sick for over two weeks. At the same time, I was making final changes to book files, uploading files to various platforms, waiting for the platforms to approve the files, etc. When I decided last August to aim for a publication date at the end of May, I really thought I was leaving myself plenty of time to get everything done, but the main thing I learned from this May is that I should aim to have everything done the month before publication. It took KDP way longer to approve the files than I anticipated, and as a result, I decided to push the paperback publication date back a week (initially, I intended for everything to publish on May 31). In the end, I didn’t mind having two publication dates. If anything, it made things more exciting! However, I didn’t love feeling rushed on everything. I’m happy with the quality of the book I published, but I think it would have been much less stressful to have things done earlier.

I left finding ARC readers very late, maybe partially due to fear that no one would want to read Into Shadow. To my great surprise, I had so many people asking for ARCs that I had to turn people down! On one memorable day, I woke up to ninety-two TikTok notifications related to ARCs. I’m so glad I decided to send out ARCs, and I’m so grateful for every single review and reader. Even if maybe a third of the readers translated into reviews, I was lucky enough to find ARC readers who really connected with my book, which gave me a huge confidence boost leading up to publication!

My goal for this book was relatively small. I didn’t have a sales goal, really, because I knew that sales weren’t entirely within my control. My goal was just to find a few people who would really connect with Into Shadow and love it. After receiving reviews from ARC readers, I actually felt as if I had achieved that goal. I feel incredibly lucky to have already found readers who love Into Shadow, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I have spent many of the past ten days crying happy tears.

May 31 (Publication Day 1)

May 31 was a wonderful day. I went for a delicious sushi dinner with my sister and then came home for a small virtual launch party with very close friends and people who were heavily involved in the book’s creation. I was fortunate enough to have people there who were willing to listen to me read chapter one, give a speech, and talk about how excited I was. My sister bought me dragon-shaped earrings that I will probably wear until the end of time. Someone else got me an incredibly delicious cake, and others got me the most beautiful bouquet of flowers ever. After the virtual launch, my in-person guests and I had a dance party in the living room. 

I ended the day feeling extremely lucky to have such wonderfully supportive people in my life.

June 1 to 6

I fully intended to take a break last week, but I was feeling so excited about the story that I prepared the sequel for Into Shadow for my beta readers and sent it out. I’ve been stuck on the sequel for a while now because I’ve been torn about splitting it into two books, but I’ve tentatively decided to keep it as one longer book. I’m starting to get excited about the sequel already. I reread it in full this week, and I ended it with the feeling that there’s a lot of good stuff there. 

Writing this sequel was one of the hardest writing projects I’ve ever done. I wrote the bulk of the book while dealing with a number of query rejections for Into Shadow, and so writing this book was a huge struggle mentally. The fact that I can see a lot of positives about it now is actually very encouraging, but we’ll see if my beta readers agree with me!

June 7 (Publication Day 2) and Beyond

The paperback release day was a quiet day for me, but it was also very nice. Lots of people have received their copies of Into Shadow before I’ve received mine, but I’m expecting mine today! The book is finally out in the world, and I’m feeling very positive about it. Lots of people have been messaging me or posting about the book, and it’s left me feeling incredibly grateful. 

I’m a new author, and so I really hoped to build a good foundation with this book for a long career. While I’m hoping to build up more sales eventually, I’m really happy about (and proud of) every single sale so far. I’m planning to write until the end of time, and I knew I’d have to start somewhere. I find this to be an incredibly encouraging start, so thank you to everyone who has read Into Shadow and otherwise provided support! 

It’s Publication Month!

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There’s something magical about spring. One day, you’re having what you don’t know is the last snowstorm of the season. Then, suddenly, you look around and the grass is a vibrant green and multicoloured flowers have burst out of lawns. Perhaps I’m woefully unobservant, which is possible, but I could have sworn those flowers weren’t there yesterday. The seasonal depression you didn’t even realize you had begins to lift. And so, while spring is my least favourite season, I have to admit that there’s some magic there.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I chose May 31 as my publication date, although, in reality, it was about nine months ago. It feels like I blinked and May charged in. 

Into Shadow will be out in the world in just three weeks, and I’m feeling a million things at once. I’m excited for people to read it, of course. I fell in love with this story as I wrote it, and I hope other people will fall in love as well. However, I’m also feeling the bundle of nerves that I’m sure comes with publishing a debut novel (What if no one reads it? What if people do read it?). I also have to accept that I’ve made mistakes in this process, ones that will hopefully help me do better next time. At this point, I need to let go of perfectionism and accept that I poured my heart and soul into this book—and that’s enough.

I picked an end-of-May publication date for several reasons. The first is that my protagonist’s birthday is in May. The second is that I imagined the events of the book beginning in June and taking place over the heat of the summer, so May seemed like a perfect time to release the book. I recently learned that May is also mental health month, so the stars aligned perfectly there. 

I wrote this book because it was the book I needed. When I first started getting manic, I couldn’t find any high fantasy books with a protagonist who had bipolar disorder. I was so scared, and I needed reassurance in the form of a book. I needed to know that people with bipolar disorder could still have adventures, fall in love, and live a full life. I didn’t need a happy book. I didn’t even need a book entirely about bipolar disorder—I just wanted a book where a character lives with bipolar, because people with mental illness deserve to do cool things like ride dragons, too. 

And I’m so proud of this book, because I did that. Not only did I give a character with bipolar a chance to shine, I explored the nuances of living with an illness like bipolar and how it can impact your self-perception and self-worth, and I wrote a proper adventure story that I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of times. At one point, I was reading this book several times a week, not to edit it, but because I loved it. This was the book I needed, and I am hopeful that it will be a book that other people need as well.

This is a book about bipolar disorder, stigma, dragons, romance, and heroism. I wrote it in the style of the fantasy I love. It’s complex. It’s gritty. It’s political. Two of the five point-of-view characters are men, but I’ve always considered this a story with women at its focus. 

I’ve been on quite a journey with this book. We made it to the highs of being a finalist in a publisher’s contest to the lows of the query trenches and everything in between. I’ve loved this book, and I’ve doubted myself more times than I can count. But the result of all of this is a book that I’m immensely proud to be sharing with the world.

So, in this magical month of May, I hope you’ll consider searching up Into Shadow. It will be available on Amazon (print and ebook) and on Kobo (ebook) on May 31. I will officially list it within the next week or two, so stay tuned! 

Into Shadow: The Origin Story

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Every book starts somewhere. Book ideas are everywhere, but there’s something special about the ones that get written. There has to be, if you’re going to spend years of your life on this idea and these characters. An idea grabs hold of you and refuses to let you go, and there’s always a reason for that. 

Into Shadow had an interesting start. It began as some very disparate ideas that somehow combined into a cohesive whole. But if I’m going to talk about Into Shadow, I really have to begin with another novel, Trial by Fire.

When I was eighteen, I finished the first draft of my first novel. It was terrible, of course, so I re-plotted and rewrote multiple times until it was a completely different book. Six or seven years later, I was still struggling with this project. Something just wasn’t working, but I was reluctant to let go of something that I’d worked so hard on for so long. I was also desperately attached to my characters. I had little flirtations with other ideas, but I always came back to Trial by Fire, because I was determined to make it work.

Eventually, my sister told me that I should give it a rest and write something else. She was right, of course, but it was hard to accept at the time. How could I just give up? And I’d been working on it for so long…could I really write a whole new novel? Was I even capable of writing a new novel?

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, about six months after this conversation. I was feeling frustrated and stuck with my writing. That was when I finally decided I would try something new.

I started, very simply, with dragons. I wanted to write a book about dragons. 

I began by researching dragon book clichés, so I could decide which ones to avoid. I had some other ideas in the back of my mind, and I began to consider them and see which would work with a dragon story. 

The seed of this story was really a “what if” question: what if dragon riders weren’t revered, but oppressed? I imagined a world where dragon riders were so looked down upon that people refused to touch them, which is not a particularly new concept, as there have been groups of people throughout history who are considered “untouchable” (it’s not just historical, either). However, I put a fantastical spin on it. In my world, people who can bond with dragons aren’t allowed to touch anyone else. Of course, I then asked, why? I decided it was because the dragon people bonded with a dragon by touching it, and bonding meant that the dragon would do their will. People in my world are afraid that being touched by a dragon person means that they’ll be enslaved to their will as well. Eventually, I decided to name the dragon people “Rooks.”

From there, I needed a protagonist. After being diagnosed with bipolar II myself, I really wanted to see a protagonist with bipolar disorder in fantasy, which was how Wren came to be. I wanted to write the book that I’d needed when I was diagnosed, which I hadn’t been able to find. I decided Wren would be a Rook who lived with bipolar disorder, and I knew that I wanted her inner struggle for the book to be around her self-worth. She has to figure out how to fit into a world that looks down upon her in every way. So, while the book features dragons, it’s not really about dragons. They’re a catalyst, but the heart of the story is Wren’s struggle with herself. 

These two things (the Rooks and Wren) were enough to thoroughly capture my interest, and soon I was building the story by adding more ideas that had been on the backburner for a while.

I’d had a dream about four powered people breaking into a castle. I don’t remember my dreams too well, but I did remember one of them could see the future, and she had foreseen her own death. Because of that dream, I’d been itching to write a book with multiple point-of-view characters. I realized that this could be just the book for this idea. I was so intrigued by someone fighting against her death, and from there, I came up with the character of Celeste. (Ultimately, I did write the book with multiple point-of-view characters, but it turned into five instead of four.) Initially, I assumed I would give all of my point-of-view characters magic, but in the end, only Wren and Celeste have magic. Wren’s magic came directly from her being a Rook (wouldn’t it be interesting if someone who’s forbidden from touching other people had a power that only worked through direct, skin-to-skin touch?).

As you can see, a book that started as “I want to write a book about dragons” soon turned into something much more complex. It began out of pure desperation. I just wanted to write something to get some distance from Trial by Fire, and I’m so glad I did! Giving up on Trial by Fire ended up being the best thing I could have done for my writing, because I wrote something that was way better. 

In the end, I’m really happy with Into Shadow. It’s a culmination of many ideas and many, many hours of work. At the beginning, it meant a lot of mind-mapping in a notebook and playing with different ideas. It’s also the direct result of some life experiences. Into Shadow wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t gotten bipolar disorder, and it wouldn’t exist if I’d been able to find the book I needed when I was first dealing with that diagnosis. I can’t say I’m grateful that I got bipolar disorder, but I can say I’m grateful that it enabled me to create this thing that I genuinely love. I’m so excited to share it with you! Release date and synopsis coming soon!