A few years ago, if you'd asked me what kind of writer I was, I would have said, "nonfiction."
Not because I had anything against fiction. I loved fiction. I just wasn't entirely convinced I knew how to write it. For most of my career, I wrote about things. Books. Music. Faith. Publishing. Culture. Retail. Marketing. The occasional strange corner of modern life that caught my attention and refused to let go.
Then somewhere along the way, Graveyard Girl happened. Followed by Record Shop Girl. And suddenly I found myself writing novels. Even stranger, I found myself becoming the sort of person who wakes up at three in the morning because a fictional character has decided she's unhappy with Chapter Twelve.
I wasn't expecting any of that. I certainly wasn't expecting Dark Entries.
The collection started with a simple question: What would happen if I took the things I've spent most of my life loving - music, stories, faith, weird people, old records, outsiders, graveyards, hope, doubt, beauty, loss - and turned them into short fiction?
The answer, as it turns out, was a lot of learning. The biggest surprise was discovering that writing short stories and writing novels feel almost nothing alike.
A novel is like moving into a house. You have time to explore every room. You can repaint the walls. Rearrange the furniture. Decide six months later that the kitchen should probably be somewhere else. A short story is more like spending a weekend in a hotel room. You'd better know why you're there.
When I started writing novels, I loved the freedom. If a story wanted to wander, I could follow it. If a character developed an unexpected obsession with obscure records or old graveyards or terrible coffee, there was room for that. Short stories are less accommodating. With two or three thousand words, you don't have the luxury of wandering around looking for the story. You need to know where the story lives before you start. Or at least know roughly which neighborhood it's hiding in.
More than once, I found myself cutting paragraphs and pages I'd spent hours writing because they were interesting but unnecessary. That's a painful realization for any writer. It's a little like discovering you packed six suitcases for a weekend trip.
The good news is that short stories force you to become ruthless. The better news is that they also force you to become honest. You find out very quickly what a story is actually about. A ghost story might be about grief. A haunted record shop might be about belonging. A strange encounter in a cemetery might be about grace. The costumes change. The themes don't.
The other thing I discovered was how naturally these stories emerged from playlists. I've spent most of my life standing somewhere in the overlap between faith and rock and roll. Depending on who you ask, that's either a fascinating place to stand or a deeply confusing one. For me, it's always felt normal. The music I love has shaped me as much as many sermons I've heard. Not because songs replace faith. They don't. But because songs help us pay attention. A great song can sneak past our defenses. It can ask questions we'd rather avoid. It can remind us of things we've forgotten. It can make us feel less alone. That's true whether the song comes from a church, a dive bar, a concert hall, or a teenager's garage.
In a strange way, I think stories work the same way. Both stories and songs are exercises in formation. They shape our imagination. They teach us what to notice. They give us language for longing, hope, beauty, loss, and redemption. Every one of us is being formed by something. Our playlists. Our social feeds. Our habits. Our friendships. Our stories.
One of the reasons I wanted to write Dark Entries was because I wanted to contribute something to that conversation. Not by preaching. Not by explaining everything. Just by telling stories about people searching for meaning in a world that often feels noisy, lonely, and fragmented. Or, to put it another way, stories about people who look a lot like me.
The response from readers has probably been the most humbling part of all of this. Readers consistently find things in the stories that I didn't know were there. That's not false modesty. It's true. Someone will mention a theme that emerged across several stories and I'll think, "Well, apparently my subconscious was working harder than I was." Other readers connect with entirely different stories than I expected. The story I think everyone will love isn't always the one they mention. The character I assumed was secondary turns out to be someone's favorite. A small scene becomes the thing a reader remembers months later.
I love that.
It's one of the few reminders that books are not products in the ordinary sense. They're collaborations between writers and readers. Half the magic happens after the book leaves your hands.
And that brings me to the final lesson.
The goal of Dark Entries was never really Dark Entries. The goal was readers. That sounds obvious, but I don't think it is. Readers feel increasingly precious these days. We live in a culture built for scrolling, skimming, refreshing, and moving on. Reading asks something different from us. It asks us to stay awhile. It's easy to become obsessed with sales rankings, algorithms, social media metrics, subscriber counts, and all the other numbers that float around modern publishing. Writers can spend a lot of time staring at dashboards instead of writing.
I've certainly been tempted.
But the longer I do this, the more convinced I become that the real goal is much smaller and much more human. Find readers. Write another book. Find a few more readers. Write another book. Repeat for as long as God allows. That's not a particularly exciting business strategy. It would make a terrible conference keynote. Nobody's putting it on a coffee mug or a T-shirt. But I think it's true. Every author whose career I admire seems to have built it the same way: one story, one book, one reader at a time.
That's really what Dark Entries has been for me. An experiment in short fiction. A chance to stretch different muscles as a writer. A way to explore the strange intersection where faith meets rock and roll, where playlists become prompts, where ghost stories can be about grace, and where a song can spark a conversation about spiritual formation.
And it turns out the experiment isn't over.
Around Thanksgiving, I'll be sharing a new series of Christmas stories. Like Dark Entries, these stories began with songs, though this time the soundtrack comes from a different corner of my record collection. Some are inspired by lesser-known Christmas songs that deserve more attention. Others draw from a favorite or two that have been part of my holiday listening for years.
I wasn't interested in creating haunted Christmas stories or simply transplanting Dark Entries into December. These stories lean more toward wonder, nostalgia, faith, romance, family, and the strange mixture of hope and melancholy that seems to arrive every year with the season itself. They're rooted in the conviction that Christmas is more than a date on the calendar. It's a season that still invites us to believe that Light shows up in dark places, that ordinary people can encounter grace, and that the world might be more enchanted than we often imagine.
In many ways, they're exploring the same questions as Dark Entries, just beneath a different soundtrack. Which is probably fitting. Because the longer I work on these stories, whether they're set in a graveyard, a record shop, or at Christmastime, the more I realize they've all been circling the same ideas.
So if Dark Entries taught me anything, it's this:
The stories matter.
The readers matter.
The conversation matters.
Most of all, it's been a way to find fellow travelers. Readers who love stories. Readers who love music. Readers who are still asking questions. Readers who believe imagination matters. And if Dark Entries helps me find more of those people, one reader at a time, then it's already done far more than I hoped.
Actually, that's more than enough.
