Before there was a mountain, or a manor, or a lake with light in its depths, there was just a feeling. Three feelings, really, tangled together so tightly I couldn't have told you where one ended and the next began. Grief. A longing for home. And underneath both of those, stubborn and glowing, the kind of wonder you only carry as a child, before the world convinces you to set it down.

For a long time, I thought hyperfocus was something to apologize for. I'd surface from six hours inside a screenplay and realize I hadn't eaten, hadn't texted anyone back, hadn't noticed the sun move across the sky. I'd disappear into a project and look up to find the whole afternoon gone, along with the load of laundry I swore I'd start "in just a minute." I'd sit down to paint one small thing on a black canvas and stand up four hours later with acrylic on my hands and no memory of choosing to stay that long. I used to think that meant something was wrong with how my brain worked. Now I know it means something is right.

A particular kind of vulnerability comes with sitting behind a table full of your own books. Not the vulnerability of writing them… that happens alone, in the quiet, where no one is watching, and you can rewrite a sentence eleven times before anyone knows it existed in any other form. I mean the other kind. The kind that shows up the moment you're sitting in a folding chair, in front of strangers, next to a stack of you — your imagination, your late nights, your whole unguarded heart, bound and printed and priced at ten or twenty dollars a copy.

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you put a room full of writers together. Not the polished, performance kind of magic. The real kind. The kind where someone says something from the front of the room, and it lands in your chest like it was aimed directly at you. Where you end up in a conversation with a stranger during the break and walk away with a new friend, a new perspective, or a sentence that changes the way you think about your work. Where you leave the building at the end of the day, somehow both exhausted and more alive than you were when you walked in. That is a writers conference. And if you have never been to one or if you have been on the fence about going, I want to make the case for why you should.

Expansion feels like anxiety glitter in my veins. That's the most honest way I can describe it. This particular season of my creative life — summer 2026, the theme I chose for June, the one I keep returning to — feels electric and unsettling and warm all at once. Like Felix Felicis running through your bloodstream if you've read Harry Potter. Like liquid luck. Like something that could spill if you move too fast, but glows if you hold it steady. It doesn't always feel comfortable. But it feels right.

When my mom Martina and I began turning The Christmas Witch into a film, I thought I knew the story inside and out. I had written it, after all. What I didn't expect was how much the adaptation would teach me… not just about screenwriting, but about the book itself, and about what I actually believed storytelling could do. Here's what I learned.

Something shifts when you climb high enough… the air, the light, the way time moves. Magic lives at elevation. I don't mean that metaphorically — or not only metaphorically. I mean it in the way the air feels different up here. The way sound travels. The way light moves through a ponderosa pine at seven in the morning and makes you stop whatever you were doing and just... breathe. I've lived in the White Mountains of Arizona long enough now that the place has gotten into my bones. And every summer, I'm reminded all over again: this landscape isn't just where I live. It's where I create. It's in the soil of everything I make.

There's something nobody really warns you about when you pour everything you have into something. Not the exhaustion… you expect that. Not the relief… you've been dreaming of it. It's the strange, hollow, in-between feeling that arrives after the last thing is done and the world keeps spinning like it doesn't know what just happened. The emotional hangover.

Birthdays always feel like a threshold to me. A quiet pause between one version of yourself and the next. Not dramatic… Not always even necessarily noticeable from the outside, but real. A moment to stand in the in-between and ask: who was I, and who am I becoming?

On grief, quirkiness, guitars, and finding the person who was always meant to play her.

Before Brigid Baelfyre was ever a casting call or a film role, she was something much more personal than that. She was a feeling. The feeling of losing someone so essential to you that the world rearranges itself around their absence. I lost my Papa (grandpa) when I was seventeen. He had such a profound influence on who I became — and when he was gone, I felt it in a way I didn't have words for yet. That loss lived in me quietly for years, the way deep grief does. And when I was learning what story Brigid was truly trying to tell, I found it there, in that place. She carries his echo.

What book signings have taught me about hope, magic, and showing up anyway. There's a moment, right before a signing begins, that I don't think I'll ever stop feeling.

The table is set. My mom and I have arranged everything just so — and it's always just so, regardless of whether we have a six-foot table or a cozy little corner. She's my setup partner. I direct, she helps, and somewhere in that quiet back-and-forth my nervous system settles just enough. Having her there is its own kind of magic. My neurodivergent brain appreciates the familiar warmth of someone who knows exactly how to help me feel like myself before the doors open.

And then... the doors open.

And I feel it. The rush of it. Anxious and excited and deeply, profoundly uncertain. Impostor syndrome sitting right beside wonder, the way it always does.

Treating yourself like a machine is the fastest way to lose the magic. There’s a question I used to ask myself constantly, usually around 2pm when I’d already written a thousand words, answered a dozen emails, and somehow still felt like I hadn’t done enough: Why am I so tired?

Dear Amberlight Valley,

I’m not entirely sure when you began. Sometimes I feel I created you, sketched you into existence with ink and intention. And other times… it feels like you were always there, quietly waiting for me to find you, as a place remembered more than imagined…

Once Upon a time… not too long ago, I tried to separate everything. Writing over here. Filmmaking over there. Family life in its own neat compartment. Personal struggles tucked quietly behind the scenes. I thought that’s what professionalism looked like. Clean lines. Clear divisions. Creative work that appeared effortless because the living of it was invisible. But the longer I create, the more I realize something simple and freeing:

My life is not separate from my stories. It is the soil they grow in.

Not every story wants to be written in winter.

I’ve tried to force it before… sitting at my desk while the world outside is quiet and cold, willing the words to come. Sometimes they do. But sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, I’ve learned not to panic. Because some stories are seeds. And seeds don’t bloom just because we want them to. They wait for warmth. They wait for light. They wait for the right internal season.

Dear Creative,You Don’t Have to Pick Just One Thing.

For a long time, I thought I was doing creativity “wrong.” I love writing books… but I also love filmmaking, song-writing, and painting. I feel called to storytelling… but across mediums. I’ve always loved to explore worlds through songs, novels, scripts, directing, events, and community. And everywhere I looked, the advice felt the same:

Pick one thing. Niche down. Focus harder.

So I tried. And every time I did, something in me dimmed.

A love letter to cozy, character-driven films.

I’ve always been drawn to stories that unfold gently. The ones that don’t rush to impress. The ones that linger in silence. The ones that trust the audience enough to let meaning rise slowly, like warmth spreading through cold hands. In a world that feels louder and faster by the day, I find myself craving stories that don’t shout to be heard. Stories that sit beside you instead of pulling you forward. Stories that leave room to breathe.

There’s something about the turn of the year that carries a strange kind of pressure. Even though I genuinely love the ritual of New Year’s Eve—the reflection, the quiet hope, the symbolic reset—I’ve realized that my energy doesn’t actually reset in January. If anything, it rests.

What Love at the Lantern Trail Is Unlocking for Me…

There’s a particular feeling that settles into my body when I sit down to write Love at the Lantern Trail. It isn’t urgency. It isn’t pressure. It’s recognition. This story feels like a reunion with parts of myself, with places I’ve loved, and with a version of storytelling that feels less like striving and more like remembering.

Another year is closing softly, quietly, like a storybook page turning under warm lantern light. And as I sit here reflecting on everything that unfolded, I feel both humbled and deeply proud. This year stretched me, transformed me, held me, and taught me. It asked me to rise in new ways while also returning to pieces of myself I thought I had outgrown. More than anything, it reminded me why I tell stories in the first place: to create connection, to offer comfort, to leave a little light for someone else to find their way. Here are the moments that shaped my year and what I’m carrying with me into the next chapter.