People who don’t live here think Portland rains. People who live here know Portland does something stranger. It mists. It hangs. It settles on your jacket in a fine grey film that you don’t notice until you step inside a warm room and realize you are wet through. From November to April, the city exists…
The first time a patient lied to me, I missed it completely. He was a soft-spoken man in his early forties — polite, articulate, the kind of patient who shows up five minutes early with his intake forms filled out in careful block letters. (As always when I write about clinical work, identifying details here…
Picture two characters at a kitchen table. There is coffee. There is a window. There is a question one of them has been carrying for three chapters, and the other one is about to be asked it. This is one of the most reliable scenes in psychological thrillers. It is also, structurally, a therapy session…
Suspense works because the brain treats imagined threat much like real threat — the same vigilance, the same dread, the same flood of relief — while the reader sits in perfect safety. That gap between felt danger and actual danger is where the entire thriller genre lives. I spent years practicing general and addiction psychiatry…
The defining themes of psychological thrillers are identity, memory, manipulation, obsession, and moral ambiguity — the five places where a mind can be turned against itself. The genre’s familiar tropes (the unreliable narrator, the perfect marriage, the late twist) are simply those themes wearing their work clothes. I write these books, and before that I…
Psychological thrillers are suspense stories where the real danger lives in the mind — in memory, perception, obsession, and the things people can’t admit to themselves. The genre has its car chases and its bodies, but its true engine is doubt: about what happened, about who’s lying, and sometimes about whether the person telling you…
A psychological thriller is a suspense story driven by the mind — fear, obsession, memory, and unreliable perception — rather than by external action. The danger is real, but the deepest threat is usually internal: what a character believes, represses, or can’t quite trust about themselves or the people closest to them. I write these…
Television has taught us that dangerous people look dangerous. They have intense eye contact. They have rooms you’re not supposed to go in. They have, statistically speaking, basements. This is a comforting fiction. In my years of practicing psychiatry, the most dangerous people I met almost never looked the part. They looked like the parents…
Originally posted on the Archeolibrarian blog as part of my Virtual Book Tour. I’ve loved literature since I was a child, and my fondness has only grown over the years. Every stage of my reading life has added significant elements to my writing, changing not only my style but also how I think about what…
Originally published on Story Circle Network‘s Her Stories Substack, in the True Words by Real Women section. After I made my Saturday trek over to the senior living facility where my parents lived, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with my almost 90-year-old father. They’d moved into “the Big House” ten years earlier. I’d…
The psychological thriller genre, known for its unique blend of suspense, mystery, and elements of horror, has a special place in the hearts of many book lovers. I’d like to explore some reasons behind the enduring popularity of psychological thrillers and why fans like me can’t get enough of these mind-bending stories.
A deep dive into the LGBTQ Mystery genre As an LGBTQ author with a queer-lead psychological thriller novel debuting soon—TANGLED DARKNESS (July 2025)—I’m grateful to have a role in the progression of authentic, nuanced LGBTQ characterization in popular thriller fiction. I’ve recently looked back on the history of LGBTQ representation in thrillers since the 1960s….
I’m thrilled to share that the revisions I made earlier this year to TANGLED DARKNESS might be propelling me closer to publication. In all honesty, I hadn’t anticipated the domino effect that would result from a professional manuscript edit. The process entailed several thorough read-throughs of the entire story, but it didn’t stop there. Every…
Addiction is a chronic, recurring condition defined by compulsive behavior, such as the persistent seeking and use of alcohol in the case of alcoholism, despite the negative repercussions. In my work, TANGLED DARKNESS, addiction is a prevalent theme, with various characters grappling with different forms of addiction, including pathological gambling, severe opiate use disorder, alcoholism,…
Thoughts on Themes from Tangled Darkness In TANGLED DARKNESS, an 87,000-word psychological thriller, various characters grapple with challenging pasts. These include early losses that shape their inner narratives, early exposure to authority figures marred by narcissism and corruption, and the impact of parental substance abuse on child development. Numerous factors contribute to shaping an individual’s…
Twitter may be a controversial platform lately, but it’s still a place where numerous pitch eventsoccur — opportunities to try your hand at gaining an agent or editor’s attention. There are several Pitch events happening on the internet, and I recently learned not all of them are onTwitter.Checkout this site: https://savvyauthors.com/community/classes/2023-autumn-pitchfest.1987/ Right — from October…
I’ve been a member of Sisters in Crime for nearly three years. It’s a national organization withmany local chapters. Their mission is “to promote the advancement, recognition, andprofessional development of women crime writers.” They’ve been so useful, generous, andhelpful in my ‘learning to write’ effort. It’s difficult to cover all the benefits of membership.Recently, I…
There’s an interesting resource known as The Manuscript Academy that offered a SubmissionStrategy workshop a few months ago. I posted some thoughts about having attended that,including some of the ‘lessons learned’ in my first newsletter.’Another service this group offers is project review and feedback from an agent or editor (or asmany as you’d like) on…
Where Have I Been? I pulled up a chair, facing the client with no obstacle between us. Okay, she’s not a client. Let’s call her a ‘friend’ who’s here again for another supportive session. She’s been taking the road less traveled lately. One that’s usually unknown to those millennials and gen-Xers. It’s filled with twists…
Some of you may be aware that I took a first ten pages ‘bootcamp’ seminar at the turn of the year. It dovetailed quite nicely with another Manuscript Academy Submission Strategy workshop that taught me a lot about the querying process. Beyond learning how to interpret agent responses to queries, I finished with a new…
Out of the ten rejections, I had two agents generously respond with feedback that (especially inone of them) explained why they took a pass. Maybe it’s not surprising that the feedback I gotin ‘bootcamp’ had many similarities. Listen. Two or three years ago, when I was starting thiswhole project, I heard repeatedly: “Writing is rewriting.”…
During late October and November 2022, I sent out 17 queries. By the time most agencies, agents, and editors were closed down for the Holidays (around Thanksgiving to mid-December), I had 10 rejections filed away. From what I’ve learned from social media sites, receiving a rash of rejections is a good time (especially if you’ve…
If you’re anything like I was, nearing the query process with a debut novel having no ‘business of writing’ experience, it’s difficult to know where to start. I recently emailed a fellow writer facing this daunting task and detailed some things I wish I had known two months earlier. If I could roll back the…
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