Peeking inside Her Lost Diary Provided by Pixabay INTRODUCTION: You know the trap is set. You know the hunters are waiting in the dark. But the protagonist is just walking up the stairs, completely unaware—and you want to scream at the page. That specific agony is the signature of effective suspense writing. Not the explosion. Not the confrontation. It’s the agonizing gap between what the reader knows and what the character doesn't. Her Lost Diary weaponizes this gap with sur

Photo by E. A. Fournier My writing goals have changed considerably over the years--or perhaps they've finally arrived back at the starting point, but now with hard-won experience behind them. I contracted the writing bug very early (it’s a virus, isn’t it?), and I knew my fondest goal was to make people laugh and cry from something I’d written. In my younger days, I wanted to be remembered as one of those writers who added something worthwhile to people’s lives. I started as

Peeking Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: When you spend your life fleeing from the monsters in the dark, what happens when you finally turn around and look them in the eye? That question sits at the bruised heart of Her Lost Diary. Esteffi Avila—twenty years old, one suitcase, a false name, and a mother's letter she can barely bring herself to finish reading—is not a character who chose danger. Danger chose her, inherited like a debt she never signed up for. From the nov

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: There's a diary entry in Her Lost Diary that stops you cold. It doesn't announce itself. It arrives quietly, tucked between complaints about a psychology professor and the frustrations of mall shopping. But once you read it, you can't unfind it. "Whole industries make money fixing broken things," the writer observes. "Sometimes broken is just broken. You throw away a broken plate, because you know that no glue can ever fix it. Plat

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: A brightly lit Waffle House at midnight. A quiet suburban gift shop on a cheerful street called Church. A sterile private vault corridor humming with recycled air and brushed metal. What do these places have in common? In most thrillers, danger announces itself with exotic backdrops, shadowy European alleys, fortified compounds, anonymous black-site facilities. Her Lost Diary takes a different approach entirely. It builds its tensi

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: Nothing cuts through unbearable tension quite like a perfectly timed, wildly inappropriate joke. You know the kind—the one that lands in the middle of a crisis and somehow makes everything feel survivable again. It's the quip that shouldn't work, delivered by the person who absolutely should not be making it right now, and yet the room exhales. Her Lost Diary is a thriller with real stakes. People are being hunted. Secrets carry leth

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: When the world falls apart, do you panic—or do you start doing the math? Most of us would like to believe we'd stay calm. That we'd assess the situation, identify the variables, and work the problem. But the truth is, that kind of steadiness under pressure isn't a personality setting you flip on in a crisis. It's something built, slowly, out of necessity. In Her Lost Diary, Chayce Wagner is that kind of person, and watching him ope

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: There is something about ink on paper that a screen can never replicate. A typed message is clean, controlled, anonymous and... passive. But a handwritten page? It bleeds. It trembles. It crosses things out, writes in the margins, draws arrows, and scribbles pictures beside the text. Studies have been done with wired-up writers to compare their brains while using keyboards and screens vs. the same writers using pen and paper. Recent

ZOOM CALL WITH THE OWNER OF DAMONZA: Robynne, my Project Director, notified me that they wanted to set up a Zoom meeting with the Art Director before beginning the cover design process. I wondered who that would be and they said it was Damon Freeman, the owner and brains behind the company. This was a new experience for me and intimidating. I greatly admire the Damonza company and feel they do a great job creating covers for far more important writers than myself. I was quite

A Peek Inside Her Lost Diary INTRODUCTION: Imagine packing your entire life into a single suitcase and walking away from your own name. Not metaphorically—literally: clothes, shoes, toiletries, a stack of diaries, and IDs that belong to someone who doesn't exist. What does that do to a person's soul? This is the emotional premise at the heart of Her Lost Diary. Before the thriller mechanics kick in, before the cartel shadows lengthen across the page, the novel opens with some

After all the writing and editing, after the Beta readings, the rewrites, the trimmings and more trimmings, we finally arrive at the cover design. I find this part of the book process to be interesting, even exciting. In my mind's eye I have an image of the cover that will wrap around the content I've agonized over for three years, but that image is more emotional than visual. It's more related to the reaction that I hope people will take away with them upon viewing the cover