Behind every writer lives a constellation of obsessions, those secret passions that fuel the creative fire when inspiration runs thin. Mine have always dwelt in the liminal spaces—between light and dark, cultivation and wildness, healing and harm.
Take my poison garden, for instance…
Poison Garden
While other gardeners plant roses and lavender, I am planning my garden to nurture belladonna, foxglove, and nightshade. There’s something intoxicating about plants that embody such duality—breathtakingly beautiful yet potentially lethal, medicines at the right dose but poisons when misused. They’re living metaphors for the stories I tell, where love itself can be the sweetest poison, and the most dangerous creatures often wear the most alluring faces.
Some of these plants are medicinal. Even medicinal mushrooms are tailored in tinctures or teas, or are encapsulated for specific ailments or to boost immunity. Some plants, considered poisonous, can in the right amounts and delivery, can be healing.
Kitchen Witchery
This fascination extends into my practice of kitchen witchery. I don’t separate the mundane from the magical; they’re woven together in every meal I prepare, every herb I grow, every intention I infuse into daily rituals. There’s profound magic in the ordinary—in kneading bread while focusing your will, in the alchemy of transforming raw ingredients into nourishment, in understanding that sustenance feeds both body and spirit. My kitchen is my first creative laboratory, where I learned that power comes not from grand gestures but from consistent, intentional practice.
Black Cats Write Too
And then there’s Jiji, my familiar in training. Named after the sassy black cat from Kiki’s Delivery Service, she embodies that perfect witch’s companion energy—simultaneously dignified and ridiculous, mystical and utterly pragmatic. She supervises my writing sessions with varying degrees of approval (mostly expressed through strategic keyboard sitting), and I’ve learned to read omens in her behavior. When she curls up on a manuscript, it’s blessed. When she knocks my coffee over, perhaps that scene needs revision anyway.
Poetry Rocks Hard
Poetry has been my secret language since adolescence. While I spent years writing content that sold products and built brands, poetry remained my private sanctuary—the place where I could be raw, vulnerable, honest. Those short, evocative pieces taught me how to distill emotion into its purest form, how a single image could carry the weight of an entire story. That skill translates directly into my romance writing, where every scene must shimmer with subtext, where what remains unspoken often matters more than dialogue.
Night Bloom Inspirations
My love affair with the night itself might be the most defining passion. I’m not a morning person forced into nocturnal habits—I’m a creature who genuinely comes alive when darkness falls. There’s a particular quality to night consciousness, a loosening of boundaries, a sense that anything might be possible once the sun surrenders its tyranny. Night-blooming flowers understand this. They don’t waste energy competing in daylight’s harsh glare; they wait for their moment, then unfurl with devastating beauty, perfuming the darkness with scents too intense for day.
Plus, the night is quiet. Just Jiji and I, writing together into the deep morning.
This is why Nightbloom exists as more than just a brand name. It’s a philosophy, an aesthetic, a claim to space for those of us who thrive in twilight. My color palette—deep purples melting into turquoise, teal, and cobalt blue—evokes that magical hour when day surrenders to night, when the world transforms into something richer, stranger, more honest.
My Passions Run Deep
These passions aren’t separate from my writing; they’re the root system feeding everything I create. The poison garden teaches me about dangerous beauty. Kitchen witchery reminds me that magic lives in intention and repetition. Jiji keeps me humble and slightly annoyed. Poetry hones my ability to strike emotional precision. And the night itself—the night promises that transformation is always possible, that our shadow selves deserve recognition, that some flowers bloom most brilliantly when no one is watching.
Now, I’m inviting readers into this world I’ve been cultivating in secret. Every vampire I write carries echoes of my poison garden—beautiful, dangerous, misunderstood. Every witch channels the kitchen magic I practice daily. Every love story unfolds with the intensity of night-blooming flowers, brief and eternal, delicate and devastating.
These are my secret passions, no longer secret. These are the roots from which Nightbloom grows.
Leave a Reply