The Stories That Shaped Mine

Before I ever wrote The Harbinger, A Triquetra Chronicle, I was a reader.

Like most readers, I didn’t think much about patterns in what I was choosing. I just knew what I was drawn to…

Stories that moved between timelines.
Stories where history felt alive rather than distant.
Stories that carried a quiet sense of mystery; not loud or fantastical, but just enough to make you question what might exist beneath the surface.

Over time, those preferences began to form a kind of throughline.

Writers like Kate Morton and Susanna Kearsley created worlds where the past and present didn’t just coexist, they informed each other. Where memory and history shaped the characters as much as any external plot. There was a depth to those stories that lingered.

Later, I found myself pulled toward authors like Gwendolyn Womack and Irina Shapiro, where something more intangible began to surface…intuition, connection, the suggestion that time might not be as linear as we’re taught to believe. There there were the stories that existed slightly outside the lines.

Books like Discovery of Witches and The Fortune Teller, where symbolism, interpretation, and the question of meaning itself became part of the narrative. Not necessarily answers, but invitations to look more closely. Looking back, it’s easy to see how those layers began to stack.

History.
Mystery.
Connection.
A quiet thread of the unexplained.

Not as separate interests, but as parts of the same story I was always trying to find. And eventually, to write.

When I began The Harbinger, I wasn’t consciously thinking about those influences. I wasn’t trying to replicate a style or fit into a category. I was following the same pull I had as a reader.

Toward something layered.
Something that unfolded over time.
Something that trusted the reader to sit with questions instead of rushing toward answers.

Only later did I realize that the story I was writing lived in the same space as the books I had always been drawn to.

Which, in some ways, feels inevitable. We don’t create in isolation. We build from what has stayed with us. From the stories that made us pause. The ones we thought about long after we finished them. The ones that felt like they were doing something just slightly different; even if we couldn’t quite explain what it was.

Those are the stories that shape us.

If we’re lucky, they’re the ones that eventually lead us to tell our own.