My Fiction Is Coming Home

For a long time, I kept my fiction in a completely different house.

Not hidden, exactly. If you went looking, you'd find it — its own name, its own website, its own quiet corner of the internet, with its own front door and its own address. But it never lived here, on this blog, next to the recipes and the home rhythms and the Tuesday-morning wrestling with Scripture. I told myself that was just organization. Tidy. Sensible. Keep the business in its own house, keep the heart-share in this one.

But if I'm honest, it was never really about tidiness. It was about believing, somewhere underneath, that my stories didn't quite belong under the same roof as the rest of my sacred, ordinary, multipassionate life — that they needed a whole separate structure to be taken seriously. As someone who's spent a lot of energy trying to keep every part of myself in its own labeled box, that's about as unnatural as it gets.

I don't believe that anymore.

Why I Kept My Stories in a Different House

If you've been here a while, you know this space holds a lot at once — the kitchen and the prayer closet, the decluttering project and the identity questions, the AuDHD brain trying to build a rhythm that actually fits it. Soft Sacred Slow was never meant to be one narrow lane. It was meant to be honest about what a full, multipassionate life actually looks like.

So why did fiction get its own separate house instead of just being another room in this one?

I think I was protecting it. Or protecting myself from what it might mean if the stories didn't land, if the idea of being an author felt too big or too vulnerable to fold into a space where I was already showing up as myself. It felt safer to let it live somewhere else entirely, run by a separate version of me.

Honestly, that's not some unique quirk of mine — it's what the world tells almost everyone to do. Keep your brand clean. Don't mix your personal life with your business. Have a separate "platform" for the separate thing. Most people just absorb that as common sense and never question it.

But my AuDHD brain grabbed onto it especially tight, for reasons that had nothing to do with branding. Some of it was masking — presenting a curated, contained version of myself because an integrated, all-of-me version has felt like "too much" before. And some of it was rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD — that intense, physical fear of rejection or criticism that a lot of neurodivergent people carry — quietly deciding that if the fiction got rejected, at least it wouldn't take the rest of me down with it.

I bet you've found yourself doing something similar.

But stories have never been separate from my faith, my home, or my healing. They've always been how I process the same things I write about here — just wearing a different costume.

What Fiction Has Always Been Doing Here Anyway

Every story I've written has come out of the same soil as everything else in this space — a Charleston-shaped homesickness, a curiosity about the people who don't usually get to be the main character, a belief that ordinary lives are worth telling the truth about.

That's not separate from Soft Sacred Slow. That is Soft Sacred Slow. It's just been happening quietly, in a house of its own.

So starting now, my fiction is moving in. You'll find it here under a new tag — My Stories — right alongside everything else I share. Not a separate brand you have to go looking for, not a different address to remember. Just another room in the one house I actually live in.

The Publishing House I Never Talked About Much

A little backstory, since some of you are meeting this side of me for the first time: a few years ago I started Salty Page Books — a small publishing home for the kind of fiction I couldn't find enough of. Clean stories. Diverse main characters. Settings that felt lived-in rather than researched. The tagline I landed on was Authentic Voices. Diverse Perspectives. Messages That Matter. — and I meant every word of it, even when I was the only one who knew the project existed.

I built it carefully, and quietly, in its own separate house, off to the side of this blog. That's exactly the house I'm folding into this one now.

Ten Stories, One Kitchen: Meet the Salty Pages Collection

The first thing coming home is a collection I wrote a while back called The Salty Pages Collection — ten interconnected short stories, ten different genres, all set in the Lowcountry around Charleston.

I keep coming back to salt as the way to describe what I was reaching for. Salt doesn't cover up a dish — it brings out what's already there. That's what I wanted these stories to do: not flatten anyone into a lesson or a stereotype, but season the truth of who they already were. Amara wrestling with what success costs her Southern roots. Naomi learning that her grandmother's wisdom and her modern instincts aren't actually in competition. Ten women, ten genres — cozy mystery next to psychological thriller next to slow-burn romance — all held together by the same tidal, moss-draped setting that's always felt like a character to me.

These aren't excerpts or teasers. They're full stories, written the same way I write everything else here — from the real, complicated, faith-soaked place I actually live.

What Happens Next

Starting this Saturday, I'll be republishing the Salty Pages Collection right here, one story at a time, under the My Stories tag. If you've read them before on Substack, consider this a homecoming for both of us. If you haven't, you're getting them for the first time in the same space where I share everything else — no separate sign-up, no different version of me to go find.

I'm genuinely glad these two houses are finally becoming one. Come sit with me in this one too.

If this resonated and you want to keep sitting with me as this space keeps growing and changing, come join the community — subscribe to the newsletter and you'll get The Sunday Sabbath in your inbox each week, plus first word on whatever's coming home next.

If this stirred something in you, I'd love to hear it — reply and tell me what this brought up for you, or share your own story below. This is a space to process together, not just read alone.