Horseman Rising is what happens when the author you think you know decides to try something new.
To dig deeper.
Deeper into the past.
Deeper into regional history.
Deeper into the stories, legends, and folklore of the place where she was born.
And somewhere along that road, she finds herself becoming someone new.
Or maybe she finds her way back to who she was all along.
For most of my writing career, readers have known me through romantic comedies, poetry, contemporary stories, humor, heartbreak, and complicated people trying to figure themselves out. I love those books. I am proud of them. They are real parts of me.
But Horseman Rising pulled something different out of me.
It brought me back to the Hudson Valley—not just as a setting, but as something alive. Something with a memory. Something that could hold beauty, history, grief, fear, and magic all at once.
I was born in Sleepy Hollow, back when it was still called North Tarrytown, and I spent part of my childhood in Pocantico Hills. These places were part of my life long before I ever thought about putting them into a book.
The roads, the woods, the old churches, the stone walls, the cemeteries, the ruins, and the stories people have passed down for generations were always there.
I just had to learn how to see them again.
When I started writing this book, I thought I was experimenting with a new genre. I thought I was simply trying something darker, more atmospheric, and more suspenseful.
I did not expect the book to change me.
But it has.
The deeper I went into the folklore and history, the more personal the story became. I started looking at familiar places differently. A patch of woods was no longer just a patch of woods. An old foundation could hold a secret. A quiet road could feel like a doorway between what happened once and what might still remain.
And the more I wrote, the more I felt like I was meeting the author I had always wanted to be.
Or remembering her.
Before categories. Before algorithms. Before worrying about what I was supposed to write, what would sell, or what readers expected from me.
Before all of that, I was simply someone who loved stories.
Especially the strange ones.
The haunted ones.
The stories where the truth was buried beneath the version everyone thought they knew.
That part matters to me more than I originally realized.
Especially in the darker moments of my life, I have never felt fully understood.
People have understood pieces of me. The funny part. The capable part. The part that keeps going. The part that can carry too much and still somehow get everything done.
But not always the rest of me.
Not the contradictions. Not the shadows. Not the hurt. Not the history. Not the parts of me that are harder to explain.
Sometimes I think people see the version of me that makes the most sense to them, and then stop looking.
The Horseman has been misunderstood too.
He has been turned into a monster, a warning, a frightening shape moving through the darkness. People see him, decide what he must be, and rarely question whether the story they were given was ever the whole story.
Kat does.
Kat looks closer.
She sees what other people have missed. She understands that there is more beneath the legend, more beneath the fear, and more beneath what everyone has already decided to believe.
I think there is a part of me that needed to write that.
The idea that someone might look past the obvious version of you.
That they might see the darkness and not immediately turn away.
That they might understand not only the easy parts, but the complicated ones too.
I am still searching for that kind of understanding in my own life.
But my readers have come closer than almost anyone.
Through my books, my poetry, and the pieces of myself I have placed on the page, readers have met me in places where I have sometimes felt completely alone. They have recognized parts of themselves in my words, and in doing that, they have made me feel seen too.
That connection has meant more to me than I know how to explain.
Maybe that is part of the magic of writing.
You create something because you are trying to make sense of yourself, and then someone else reads it and says, “Me too.”
Suddenly, neither of you is quite as alone.
Horseman Rising has become much more than a book to me.
It has reconnected me to my history, my hometown, my imagination, and the kind of storytelling that first made me want to become an author.
It has also made me braver.
Braver about writing darker stories. Braver about trusting my instincts. Braver about allowing myself to change direction, even after people believed they already knew what kind of author I was.
There is a strange and beautiful kind of magic in finding yourself again.
In trying something completely different and realizing it feels more like you than anything you have done before.
In discovering that the road forward might begin by returning to where you came from.
I don't know exactly where this road will lead.
I don't know what Horseman Rising will become once it belongs to readers instead of only to me.
But I feel—and deeply hope—that this book is the catalyst for something bigger.
For my writing career.
For the stories I tell next.
For the author I am becoming.
And maybe, in some ways, for the person I am still finding my way back to.
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If you feel moved to help bring Horseman Rising—and whatever comes next—to life, even a dollar is appreciated more than you know. Support is always available through my main Buy Me a Coffee page.