“We found it. I can’t believe we found it,” Reese said. In her hand an EMF reader’s needle was twitching with wild energy between the orange and red.

Leisel didn’t need to check the EMF herself or pull out the infrared scanner to check for unnatural temperature fluctuations. She didn’t need to list off any para-scientific observations into her voice recorder for later puffed-up proof of their usually proofless investigations. She didn’t need any of that because she was seeing it with her own two eyes.

A portal. A gossamer layer of distortion stretched in the doorway of the rundown house they were trespassing in this late night.

Reese grabbed Leisel by a handful of her sleeve, drunk on enthusiasm. “I told you, didn’t I? Forgotten places. Old doorways. Witching hours. Liminal places equals portals.” Then Reese outright squealed with glee.

Leisel was the opposite of overflowing with excitement. She was struck dumb. Struck numb. Struck frozen.

“You’re getting pictures, right?”

“Yes. I’m getting pictures.” However, when Leisel raised her phone, there was a problem. “It’s not showing up.” She glided her thumbs across the screen to zoom in. Definitely not.

Leisel tingled where Reese pressed against her side to get a look. “Hmm. Turn up the screen brightness.” Leisel did. “Try it with flash.” Leisel did. “Let me…” Reese fumbled with the industrial flashlight hanging from the tool belt she wore on such outings to carry all her thingamombob tools of the trade of paranormal investigation.

The LEDs flared onto the portal, illuminating the frame and that whole chunk of the wall, but not — very notably — reaching through to the room next door.

“Can you get a picture of that?”

Leisel did, but it just looked like some artistic photoshop. She gave Reese a nod when it was done anyway. She’d give Reese anything.

Reese picked up a piece of moulding long ago loosed from the floorboards and crouched in front of the portal like a softball pitcher on her mound. “Record this,” she said. Only after Leisel nodded her prepared assent did Reese underhand chuck the molding through the doorway. It sailed through the air and disappeared as it passed through the gossamer curtain.

“Oh, shit.” Leisel dropped her phone. While she had been the one to swear, she felt disconnected from her own body like a VCR tape where the audio and the picture were out of sync. “It’s real.”

“Of course it’s real,” Reese said, still helium high.

“It’s… really real.” Leisel’s mouth felt numb.

Like a balloon with a pinhole in it, Reese said, “Why wouldn’t it be real?”

Because even if they could actually see something this night out of their many nights, Leisel had still held to logical explanations. It was a trick of the light against dust. It was a spiderweb. They were breathing in a shit-ton of carbon monoxide.

Reese stepped forward and scooped up Leisel’s phone. The floorboards whined under her weight, but all the floorboards had been creaking somewhere on the scale between ominous and about-to-plunge-into-the-basement. Reese thumbed through the gallery, making sure all the records were there. She pressed the phone back into Leisel’s hands. Only in that natural way that people gripped onto the things they were given did Leisel take it.

“Why wouldn’t it be real?” Reese’s voice had gone even lower.

“Because…” But how could Leisel explain it? That her foundational understanding of how the world worked had just been cracked? Why should she have to explain it? How could it not be the same for Reese?

“We’ve been doing this since college.” Standing so close, Leisel could tell Reese’s eyes were green even in this lack of light. It had been the first albeit cliche thing about Reese that had hooked Leisel by the gut and hadn’t let her go since. Of course, beyond the green eyes came everything wondrous else. “You’ve barely missed a hunt. Why would you do that if you didn’t think it was real?”

There were others. Other temporal supernatural enthusiastics. Those who liked the experience-spectalute fun of a ghost hunt or two, but not as a part of their regularly scheduled program of life. Those who drifted in and then drifted apart. Through all of that, there was Reese. In second place, there was Leisel.

“Reese.” Leisel couldn’t say anymore. Even that single utterance was too much of an admittance. She witnessed Reese’s breath hitch, too knowing. Leisel couldn’t breathe herself.

Reese turned away, hands fisted in her own sleeves as she crossed her arms over her stomach. She glared into the portal. “I guess there’s only one thing left to do then.”

Oh.

“Go throw it.”

“You can’t!”

Reese gave Leiseil a wrinkled-nose look that very much defied that proposition. ‘Can’t’ had never stopped her in this midnight hobby.

“You — you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know what’s on the other side.”

“The fae realm. Fiji. Just the other room. I’ll never know if I don’t do it!”

“We should do more research first. Come back tomorrow night and — ”

“It could be gone by tomorrow night. In an hour. In a minute. Liminal spaces, remember?”

Leisel grasped through her brain for any objection that would stall Reese. She had been scared for her before — climbing rafters or traipsing past no trespassing signs. This was different: an undefinable danger.

Or adventure. Reese always saw the adventure side of the coin.

“Please,” Leisel said. That was all she had left: to make it a personal favor.

It seemed to work. She could see how Reese wavered, the way she shifted back, shoulders first and then her whole weight onto her heels. Leisel had long made a study of these details.

Reese gnawed on her bottom lip, a strange nervous act from her overabundant confidence. “If you don’t want me to go through tonight, Leisel, I won’t. But understand what you’re asking me to give up. Please.”

She said ‘please’ the same way Leisel had.

“I spend forty hours a week playing by the rules, so I get one night every few weeks to do this. Because I want something. Because I believe in it. And now that it’s right here in front of me, you’re going to tell me to not take that chance?”

“But what if it goes wrong?”

“But what if it goes right?”

Staring at her with those green eyes, that determined spirit, that unshakable joy for adventure — Leisel had to repeat the question Reese had just asked: “But what if it goes right?” And then another, her own thought: “What have I been waiting for.”

Leisel stepped forward and kissed Reese. It wasn’t a great kiss with all the anxiety that had built up to that moment; despite all its imperfections, Reese didn’t seem to mind.

Reese curled her fingers under the cuff of Leisel’s shirt. Never before had the pulse at her wrist felt vulnerable.
Nose to nose, Reese whispered, “Take the chance with me?”

Leisel nodded, eyes squeezed shut. You never knew what was going to be on the other side.


***

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​Chip creeps up like a fog. “You want something to drink?” He asks loud enough and close enough to be heard over the heartbeat thump of the music.

You tell him the same thing you do every night.

Below the balconied VIP area you watch the crowd of a hundred-plus people pulse like one organism. Dancing among them, like a neon splotch, a girl in a hot pink tube top who is definitely too young to be in here.

Chip’s spider-fingers graze your arm as he passes you the glass of bourbon. Had he left and come back already? Or had he come prepared?

There was a time when you took pleasure in being the only person Chip would get a drink in his own club.

A word smith’s beginner’s guide to art and design

Writers have to do more than write. In this increasingly digital world, that often includes some graphic design. Maybe it’s for making your own book covers. But even if not going down the self-publishing route, it could be for pitch contests online, website banners, marketing graphics, and a whole host of other visual material needed in online spaces.

Since April 2025, I’ve been querying my novel Safe Haven — a sci-fi retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth — my first ever writing project to reach this phase. I wish I could come away with some concrete life lessons from this year in the querying trenches, or at least some ‘tips and tricks.’ But the life lessons I’ve gotten from this experience are much more nebulous.

The ups and the downs

On one hand, I’ve been surfing on the learning curve when it comes to the entire querying process from writing the letter, finding comps, researching agents, and dealing with the emotional fallout… some of which I have discussed in previous articles. 

On the other hand, I’m still in a slush pile of my own making. I’ve tried out six different versions of a query letter without any of them having significantly better response than the others (although version six hasn’t gotten enough responses yet to evaluate). 

I mean, I haven’t gotten much response to my querying at all. As of date, it has only one partial and one full manuscript request, both later rejected. The conventional advice is that you should get a manuscript request at least one out of ten queries… so I’m way under the curve. And I can’t tell if its my query letter than sucks, my opening pages that suck, my agent researching that sucks, if my book’s concept/genre combo isn’t marketable (what I’m beginning to suspect), or I’m entirely unlucky (also a culprit, I’m sure). 

What does a rejection even mean?Literary agents responses don’t help. While I completely understand why they do it this way… if the respond at all, their rejections are so carefully and generically worded as to not push you over the edge that they are meaningless to draw conclusions from.

The rejections are so generic and impersonal, the one time an agent specifically said they where intrigued by the pitch in my query but didn’t connect with the sample pages of my manuscript, it was like nirvana. Like, wow, actually useful information to learn from!

Now, I’ve talked many times about dealing with rejection as a writer. But its been more than rejection that has gotten to me during my year in querying. It’s the ambiguity of said rejections. The agents who don’t respond unless interested. The careful meaningless form rejection letters. I don’t know what lesson to learn. 

I’ve used the whole process as an opportunity to get better. Better queries, better comps, better opening pages. I’ve followed the advice to “write the next book.” 

What’s next

But… I believe in the book I’m querying. I believe in the writing and storytelling style I’ve developed over my lifetime so far. Whether through my original short stories or days of writing fanfiction in the past, I know there are readers who enjoy what I write. 

I believe in my book and want to give it its best chance at success. Which is why I haven’t stopped querying despite the lackluster response I’ve received from agents so far. It’s also why I’m contemplating potential self-publishing; not as a plan b but as an alternate path. And one I don’t consider to be easier even if you don’t have to get past traditional gatekeepers. But I’m not at that point. (If I take that step, I want to have a few more manuscripts close to ready as I know frequency and volume of publishing are big part of self-publishing success.)

For years, my big struggle was developing my writing craft and actually finishing a novel manuscript that would be good enough for publishing. Now that I reached that milestone, it turns out querying is just a whole other fight. 

***

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(Originally published on Medium.) 

My dearest enemy,

Oh, how I loathe thee. Let me count the ways.

You make me burn with enmity every time you foil one of my schemes. Make me scream to the skies every time the news reports on your good deeds. Make malice boil up and over my skin when I even think of your silly flapping cape as you fly into the sunset.

The very thought of you sets my teeth on edge and yet I know I’m my very best evilest self because of the challenge of you. Only that makes my hate incomplete. Makes me hesitate on the killing blow, miss a step in my diabolical plans, worried in fact, this time my victory will be total and — without you — the fun of the cat and mouse game would end. And life would not be nearly as devilishly sweet.

I imagine you as you read this. Will the cardstock crumple in your fists in equally returned rage? Will you scour the words late into the night, hoping to divine some clue to my latest machinations? For certainly why would I send such a thing on love’s dedicated day unless I desired to cause its opposite.

But even I can be betrayed by passing whims of sentimentality. As I write these confessions, I wonder if you, when nursing bruises after the swell of victory, when in the thrill of chasing my steps, and within the cathartic release of cursing my name, ever feel something of the same. Like we are the opposite poles of a magnet, dis-alike yet drawn together by a force greater than fate. That we are less enemies than two parts of a chemical reaction needed for an explosion. That you thrive in the challenge of me too.

Alas, you will not have time to ponder about this too long. I’ve been in a malaise and I miss our games. The clock is already ticking and I’m sure you pick up that implied threat without much riddling.

To my fiercest rival, my most dedicated nemesis, my diametrically opposed, my perfectly aligned other half — I’ll be seeing you soon.
​
Happy Valentine’s Day.
​
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