How A Teenage Dream Became A Universe

There’s a kind of magic in beginnings, the messy kind, the kind you never realize you’re conjuring until years later when you’re standing in the ashes and realizing something new has already started to grow.

For me, that beginning was a stack of notebook paper scrawled with pencil, passed around between classes at Edison Tech High School in Rochester, New York. I was fifteen. The world was chaos, hormones, heartbreak, and caffeine, and I did what any overwhelmed teenager does, I wrote my way out.

The story was called The Life of Scarlett M. Satana. Later, it became Child of a Fallen Angel. It was part dystopian, part supernatural fever dream, the kind of story that only a kid with too many feelings and not enough sleep could write. It was overdramatic and unpolished, but it meant something. It was my escape hatch. And funny enough, a few people still have those original copies, the ones I signed in gel pen like I was already somebody. (If you’re one of those rare few, keep them safe. They’re fossils from a world that would one day transform into Stelladir.)

Eventually, I scrapped the entire story. The characters were too loud, the world too small, and I knew deep down that it wasn’t the end of something, it was the beginning of something I didn’t yet have the skill to write. But one word stayed with me. Stelladir.

It was the name of the world. And even as I tore down the rest, that word refused to die. It haunted me, whispered to me. I kept it tucked away like a relic from a forgotten faith, knowing someday, I’d need it again.

Years passed. I grew up, got a little more heartbroken, a little more healed, and a lot more determined. I studied people, love, grief, trauma, all the messy, beautiful things that make us human. I became a therapist in training and realized that writing and healing are made of the same material: both are about holding pain in your hands and deciding it can be turned into something sacred.

That’s when Veil & Valor started to take shape, not as a single story, but as a world. A rebellion, a city of ash and opulence, a pantheon of gods who refuse to be silent. A sprawling, broken world that reflects how we survive our own.

I’ve always been obsessed with dystopias, The Hunger Games, Gone, The Noise, The Giver, Divergent, those stories where survival is rebellion. But I was also a fantasy kid to the bone: Eragon, Harry Potter, fairies, dragons, and ancient gods. And because I’ve always walked a pagan path, mythology and spirituality live in my bones. Every story I write feels like a ritual, a spell for the lost, a hymn for those who’ve burned and still rise again.

The Veil & Valor Chronicles became the place where all those obsessions collided. It’s dystopia tangled in fantasy, politics wrapped in myth, rebellion braided with romance. It’s the story of power and ruin, but also of what comes after, how people still find beauty in the wreckage, how love still blooms even in the dark.

The first book, Shadows of A Withering Heart, was my re-entry into Stelladir, the world I built, burned, and rebuilt again. It’s about Violet Payne and Ryland Sunsong, yes, but it’s also about me, the part of me that refuses to stop believing in rebirth.

Every story since has been a continuation of that original spark: a promise to the young girl scribbling in the margins of her schoolwork that she’d build something bigger than the page. Something that would outlast her heartbreaks, her doubts, her beginnings. And she did. Stelladir rose from the ashes, just like she always dreamed it would.