Truthfully, I wasn’t certain what plans I had for Behind Closed Doors. Middle school was when I first fell in love with creative writing and when I branched off from fanfiction. Horror and psychological thrillers became favorites to explore. I knew then that I wanted to try being a published author one day as a potential side B (like they always say, don’t quit your day job!). With this particular gem, I’ve toyed with the idea of publishing it for quite some time. A heavy dose of encouragement from my beta readers, editors, and my boyfriend in the last few months finally gave me the incentive to think despite the imposter syndrome: why not?
All that hard work coming up with intricate storylines and characters, researching mental health disorders to be as realistic and accurate as I possibly could, encountering setbacks of files being deleted, corrupted, or missing— and here I was, holding myself back from allowing this manuscript that has endured and persisted over a decade to reach its full potential.
I think every writer has a horror story of one of their stories getting corrupted due to a computer virus, or losing their written scenes due to coffee spills, or a number of other small inconveniences that make us pull our hair out and wail into the abyss at having lost one of our precious writing pieces and needing to start anew. This story right here? At one point, I lost everything— all the backups on jump drives, the written worldbuilding notes, the character sheets, the drafts themselves (and there were many,) you name it— poof. Gone.
When I fell in love with writing, I was a gardener. Still am, in some cases. A scene or an image begs to be written down and I see where it leads me. That’s how Behind Closed Doors started: with an image and a tiny seed of a plotline. This psych thriller began as a completely different story. But its plot, while it has been heavily modified since the major deletion setback, still hosts the backbone of its original draft from all those years ago. I did not start entirely from scratch, though looking back, perhaps it was a pivotal point in my writing journey. At the time, it felt like this novel would never be completed. Now, it’s in the hands of two skilled editors on its path to publication.
So what is Behind Closed Doors?
At its core: a psych ward DID patient fights for freedom from under the psychotic thumbs of doctors playing God.
And, spoiler alert, it’s purposely written from the perspective of being inside the mind of a person with DID. This is not due to my choice of it being a “shock factor;” rather, it was a stylistic choice to show the perspective that the media at large, both film and print, does not explore through a different lens other than “villain,” “dangerous,” or “tragic” when it comes to these characters in darker fiction genres, and why it should be explored.
So I thought: how difficult is it to create a compelling narrative with a main protagonist who is, at their core, just a normal person who so happens to have DID?
I’ll let you decide, dear readers.
Behind Closed Doors will be published at the end of May 2025. Announcements on the exact date to come!
