The Quiet Alchemy

There’s a kind of change that doesn’t happen with fireworks or fanfare.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t demand to be seen.
It works in the liminal spaces;
between thought and intuition,
between memory and imagination,
between who we were and who we are becoming.

This is what I think of as quiet alchemy: the small, steady shifts that alter the course of everything.

It’s something I explore deeply in The Harbinger, even if it never appears in explicit language. The characters’ transformations don’t come from dramatic revelations. Instead, they arrive through whispers; signs, synchronicities, old wounds resurfacing in new forms, the feeling that history is brushing against the present moment.

Sophia doesn’t change overnight.
Neither does Ann.
Their stories move the way real lives do: not in leaps, but in ripples.

And I’ve realized that the same alchemy has been shaping my own creative life.

Writing this book didn’t happen in a burst of inspiration; it unfolded in hundreds of quiet micro-moments. The kind that shift your internal landscape just enough to make something new possible. A sentence that unlocked a chapter. A question that wouldn’t leave me alone. A scene that insisted on existing before I knew why.

Even this past month - between the events, the conversations, the book clubs, the energy of meeting readers - I’ve felt subtle shifts pulling Book Two forward. Not loudly, not urgently, but insistently. Like something humming beneath the surface, waiting to be named.

And maybe that’s the heart of quiet alchemy:

We grow while we’re busy doing something else.
We change in the spaces where we weren’t looking.
We become in the moments we might have overlooked.

As we move through December, a month that is both reflective and anticipatory, I’m feeling a renewed appreciation for these quieter transformations. The kind that start small and end up changing everything.

For my characters.
For my stories.
And for me.