After the Return: When the Story Keeps Speaking
There are some journeys you return from, and others you never really come back from. Scotland, unsurprisingly, was the latter. It’s taken me a full week of silence to understand why.
I didn’t just revisit the places that shaped The Harbinger, I stepped into a space where the story began speaking back.
Walking through Edinburgh Castle, wandering the closes, standing in the Highlands with the wind cutting sharp and ancient… it felt less like research and more like remembering. Scenes I had imagined took on physical weight. Characters I had written felt suddenly near, like echoes following a half a beat behind me.
It wasn’t just nostalgia. It wasn’t even magic, though it felt like magic. It was recognition.
And recognition always rearranges something.
When I got home, I didn’t create right away. I didn’t post. I didn’t write.
I needed the stillness, the kind that lets an experience sink beneath the surface instead of skimming across it. I needed space to integrate everything Scotland stirred awake. And in that quiet, two things became clear:
The Harbinger is reaching more people than ever.
In the days after I returned, new reviews started coming in; thoughtful, emotional, generous. There’s something surreal about reading reflections from strangers who connected deeply with a world that once existed only inside you. Every review feels like a small anchor, proof that the story has begun its own journey.
The next chapter is already forming.
Book Two didn’t arrive as an idea. It arrived as a presence.
A whisper.
A thread.
A face I didn’t expect.
A question I suddenly had to answer.
The inspiration I gathered in Scotland - the landscapes, the sensations, the places where time feels thin - didn’t just fill in details for Book One’s world. They opened a doorway into what comes next.
And then, as if to make the shift undeniable, the invitations became real.
Three signing events this December…including my first event where people will actually purchase tickets to hear my speak. (Which feels like its own initiation, a quiet acknowledgement that the story has taken root.)
There’s a strange beauty in watching something you created take on a life beyond your hands. You write in solitude for months. Then suddenly, you’re invited to step out from behind the page and meet the world that formed around it.
I think that’s why I needed this integration week. Not to recover from Scotland…but to adjust to everything that followed.
This next season feels like movement. Expansion. That sense that the story is no longer just mine. And maybe that’s the greatest magic of all: when a book stops being a private world and becomes a shared one.
I’m ready for what’s next. And I’m grateful you’re here for it.
