Three books in 365 days was not clean. It was a wild, chaotic mess. It was school schedules and band rushes and late-night chapters written past the point of good sense. And I am so proud of it.
I wrote these books as a single mom with a full-time job, two part-time freelance jobs, and two part-time volunteer roles. I wrote them between school schedules and band rushes for my daughter, between permission slips and pickup lines, between figuring out what we were going to eat and whether I had time to turn a pile of clothes into actual, folded laundry.
Most of the writing did not happen in long, dreamy stretches. It happened in the margins. A scene drafted after the kids went to bed and well into the wee hours of the morning, when my brain and body were begging for sleep. Notes typed during the wait outside band practice. A chapter revised in the quiet stretch before the next day started asking for me again.
And yes, part of this year was also me arguing with myself about convenience. About whether I should feel guilty for using DoorDash or Instacart when my parents never had to rely on those options. About whether choosing help meant I was failing at something. I had to learn, over and over, that help is not a character flaw. Sometimes it is the only way to keep moving without burning out.
This post is about what that year felt like: the beginning, the middle, and the end. About a cast of characters who are all magical in their own right. And about why this fictional series keeps circling real-world truths: justice, hope, and the danger of erasing stories.
Book One: I Know What I Saw, When Belief Becomes a Lifeline
The first book began where so many real fears begin: with someone saying, “I am sure I saw something,” and everyone around them trying to sand it down into, “Maybe you imagined it.”
Kiera’s story starts with that pressure: the isolation of not being believed, the quiet humiliation of being dismissed, and the bone-deep instinct that something is wrong anyway. In I Know What I Saw, that tension turns into action when Paige disappears and the “it is nothing” approach finally collapses under the weight of consequences.
What stayed with me most while writing Book One was how quickly love becomes a verb in a crisis:
- Friendship as faith: Paige believes Kiera before she has “proof.” That kind of belief is its own magic, steady and powerful because it refuses to abandon someone at their most vulnerable.
- Family as complicated protection: the Allison coven has history, tradition, and good intentions, but good intentions do not stop harm. Sometimes family protects you, and sometimes it protects the version of the world that feels easiest to keep.
- Standing up for what is right, even when it is dangerous: Kiera does not get the luxury of safety before she gets courage. She moves anyway. She chooses the peril because the alternative is letting someone vanish without a fight.
Book One taught me the series’ spine: every voice matters, and the cost of ignoring a voice does not disappear. It just lands later, heavier.
Book Two: The Shadow Ledger, The Cost of Knowing, The Cost of Silence
If Book One is the moment you realize the danger is real, Book Two is the moment you realize it is structured.
The Shadow Ledger digs into the idea that darkness is not always claws and teeth. Sometimes it looks like bureaucracy. Like rules that only apply to some people. Like authority that calls itself “protection” while quietly controlling who gets believed, who gets recorded, and who gets erased.
This book expands the web of relationships and turns the story from “What is out there?” into “Who benefits when we do not ask questions?”
Stories can be stolen without anyone noticing
Paige’s history, who she is, where she comes from, what was taken from her, becomes part of the larger battle. Not because her pain is plot, but because systems that erase people often start by erasing context.
Love does not fix trauma, but it can hold it
Paige comes back changed. That mattered to me. Recovery is not a tidy arc, and healing is not linear. The people around her cannot undo what happened, but they can choose not to look away from it.
Truth has a price, and it is still worth it
Book Two leans hard into the idea that knowledge is not neutral. Discovering what the Ledger is and what Hollow Root has been doing forces everyone to choose: comfort or clarity. And clarity always comes with a bill.
This is also where the series becomes even more loudly about justice: not revenge, not spectacle, justice as repair, as accountability, as refusing to let the record be rewritten by whoever holds power.
Book Three: The Ink Witch, Words as Law, Ink as Power, and the Fight for the Record
The finale, The Ink Witch, is about the scariest kind of magic: the kind that sounds reasonable.
Ink magic, in this world, is weaponized procedure. It is clean sentences that become cages. It is “consent” shaped like consent, offered in a way that makes refusal feel impossible. It is the reminder I keep coming back to while writing this book:
Intent is not impact.
Hollow Root understands exactly how to use language to control outcomes. And if Book Two revealed the system, Book Three forces the characters to fight it on its own terms: clauses, loopholes, hidden costs, and the brutal power of what gets officially recorded.
Without spoiling what you will experience on the page, here are a few of the ways the finale carries the series’ heart forward:
Kiera’s courage becomes precision
Kiera has always been brave. In The Ink Witch, bravery is not enough. She has to learn restraint, timing, and how to avoid giving the enemy clean language they can use against her.
Harvey becomes the one who finishes the line
Harvey has always been the steady presence, the pattern-noticer, the quiet anchor. In this book, that steadiness turns into action: decoding, finding what was hidden, and choosing to step forward when staying quiet would be easier.
Paige’s voice matters to the outcome, not just the aftermath
Paige’s gentleness has never meant weakness. In the finale, her faith, her stubbornness, and her ability to hold onto herself becomes its own resistance. She is not a device. She is not a trigger. She is a person whose story cannot be reduced.
You cannot erase what is real without harm
A major theme across all three books is that every story is part of a greater whole, and when you try to erase one piece, whether it is “good” or “bad,” full of love or hate, you do not create peace. You create distortion. You create the conditions to repeat the worst parts, or to build something even worse on top of them.
These books are meant to champion authenticity. To make space at the table. To say, plainly: the record matters. The voices matter. The truth matters, even when it is complicated.
Pre-Order and Release Information
The Ink Witch is available for pre-order now and officially launches February 17, 2026.
If you have been with me since the beginning, thank you. This finale was written to honor what you invested: your time, your trust, and your hearts.
Why I Write, and Who Held Me Up While I Did
Writing is like therapy for me. Not in a neat, inspirational-quote way, but in the real way, where I can see inside myself because of what pours out onto the page. I learn things while I am writing them. Sometimes I only understand what I was carrying after it shows up in a scene, in a choice, in a line of dialogue that lands harder than I expected.
I also love the consequences. Watching where I started, then tracing the decisions I made, and seeing where those decisions force the characters to end up. It is fascinating and honestly a little intimidating. It is a lot to think about, because it cannot all come with a tiny wrapped-up bow. That is not life. So I do not write it that way.
This process taught me how to be brave through fear. To be courageous on the page and outside of it. To be okay when someone says, “That is not really my genre,” or when someone tells me they did not understand a paragraph I really loved. It taught me to take a deep breath and do the unglamorous work: going back through 400 pages and trimming it down to something more digestible, even when every word meant something to me.
I love writing because it is one of the only places I have found where contradictions can exist without being forced into something simpler. Where fear can sit beside hope. Where people can be flawed and still worth loving. Where someone can mess up, learn, and keep going, because none of us are finished growing. None of us are done becoming.
And I did not write these books alone, not really.
To my family and friends who supported me, who listened, read early drafts, asked what happened next, gave me space when I was deep in it, and reminded me to eat and sleep and come up for air, thank you. Your belief mattered more than you know.
In Memory of My Grandmom Willey
This entire series is written in memory of my Grandmom Willey, one of the best storytellers I ever had the privilege of knowing.
She passed away in January 2025, and writing these books has helped me grieve her loss in the only way that feels honest: by continuing the thing she taught me without ever sitting me down to teach it, how a story can carry a person forward, even when they are gone.
If not for her, I do not know that I would have dove into this medium, into this craft, quite the way I did. When I was tired, when I doubted, when the year felt too big to hold, I kept thinking about the way she could make a room lean in just by starting a sentence.
This is me leaning in.
This is me keeping the record.
This is for you, Grandmom.
