The Shelf I Write Beside

Looking at my shelves, I can see exactly where my writing shifted this year.

Rachel Gillig changed the way I think about prose. Not because I wanted to sound like her, but because she pushed me to be a more attentive storyteller to place. Her worlds feel familiar, yet never flat. That stayed with me while writing Forbidden Sanctuary. Savannah, Georgia is not a fantasy invention. Everyone thinks they know it. That made the work harder, not easier. I had to make it feel lived in, weighted, haunted. Her writing reminded me to slow down and let the world carry meaning instead of relying on spectacle.

Keri Lake is different. Her work always hits hard. Every single time. I am slowly making my way through her entire library, and she keeps forcing me back into my own pages with uncomfortable questions about love and yearning. She does not treat desire as gentle or clean. She lets it ache. I wanted to go deeper into that space in Forbidden Sanctuary, but I made a conscious choice not to. I had to sacrifice something in favor of world building. I also did not want my debut to sprawl into a monster-sized book. I wanted it digestible. Contained. Controlled. That was not fear. That was strategy. Book two will not be so restrained. Fair warning.

Jay Kristoff sits on my shelf for inspiration, not comfort. The grit. The gore. The blood. The absolute lack of apology for going to the darkest places possible. His work reminds me not to flinch. If a story opens a door into something terrible, you walk through it. You do not hover in the doorway. That mindset has quietly toughened my revisions.

And then there is Blood Over Broken Heaven. That book destroyed me. It shattered my already questionable emotional stability and I thanked it for the experience. This was one of the rare five star reads for me this year. Very rare. It reminded me why restraint, intellect, and moral clarity matter more than pleasing the reader. That book made me raise my own internal bar. Once that happens, there is no undoing it.

The rest of my reads this year were fun. Enjoyable. They did their job. But these books changed how I write. They reshaped my standards. They made it harder to be lazy on the page. They made me more honest about what I want my stories to do to someone sitting alone with a book.

That is why they are on my shelf. Not as trophies. As reminders.

Layla