Dispatches

There is a particular kind of writing that arrives before you are ready for it. The prologue of Humana was like that.

I had been working on the novel for several months. I had Sarah, I had Jimmy, I had the announcement. But I did not have an opening. I kept starting from the wrong place — the morning of the announcement, the kitchen, the kettle. It worked, but it didn't strike.

"The baby never cried. That was the first thing they noticed."

Why That Line Works

A baby not crying at birth is, medically, a serious concern. Every nurse knows this. In those two sentences I wanted to create a double layer of fear — the fear of a medical emergency, and the fear of something worse: that the silence was intentional. That the baby had somehow already learned the world it had been born into.

I rewrote the entire novel to earn that opening. Every chapter had to justify it. I think, in the end, they do.

Dear Mikey and Michaela,

I want to tell you something I have tried to say in person and always gotten wrong — because when I try to say it out loud, I get emotional, and then you get embarrassed, and then we end up talking about something else entirely. So I am writing it down instead.

Mikey

Do you know how many times I called you because the file had disappeared, or the formatting had gone sideways, or I had accidentally deleted three chapters? And every single time, you picked up. You walked me through it with more patience than I had any right to expect. You never once made me feel foolish.

"A Special Thank You to my Grandson, my assistant, MIKEY OWENS, for his loving tech support." — from the Dedication of Humana

Michaela

There was a night when I almost stopped. You read the chapter I sent you and called me within the hour. You said: Grandma, this is real. This matters. Keep going.

I kept going because of you. With all of my heart — Grandma.

The first thing nursing teaches you is observation. Before you do anything — before you speak, before you intervene — you watch. You notice the way a patient holds their breath, the color of their skin. You learn to read what is not said. Writing fiction is exactly the same.

Patience Under Pressure

Nursing also teaches you to function under pressure without losing precision. When I was writing the birth scene in chapter eighteen — the cave, the cold, the candle — I leaned on that training heavily. I knew what the body does. I knew the sequence.

"Fear doesn't mean you can't do it." — Sarah, Chapter 18

The Body as Character

Nursing taught me to treat the body as a source of truth. Sarah's body in this novel is not a passive container — it is a constant narrator. Her nausea, her flutters, her contractions — all of it tells the story alongside her thoughts. That felt entirely natural to me.

When you write a song, you learn that words carry weight — not just meaning, but physical weight. Some words land heavy. Others float. The baby never cried lands differently than The infant made no sound, even though they mean essentially the same thing. Songwriting trained me to hear the difference.

The Rhythm of Prose

Music taught me about pacing — about tension and release. Chapter Seventeen, The Hunt, is the fastest chapter in Humana. The sentences are short. The paragraphs are short. The white space on the page does real work. That is not an accident. That is music applied to prose.

"They didn't stop running. Branches tore at Sarah's clothes. Roots snagged at her boots. The world narrowed to breath and motion and the pounding of her heart."

Silence as Meaning

The most important thing music taught me is the power of silence. In a song, a rest is not empty — it is charged. "The baby never cried." Full stop. That pause, that breath — that is where the fear lives. Not in the words. In the space between them.