Why This Story Chose Me: The Soul Behind the Somewhere Aching Series

An unforgettable literary dark romance

As I stood at the edge of my publishing debut in early 2025, I kept circling back to A Daughter to Die For. It wasn’t my first novel. It wasn’t even my second. It was my fifth — written in a feverish burst during the summer of 2024, followed quickly by books two and three.

I had other options. Safer options. Stories that were less strange, less raw, less likely to make people tilt their heads and wonder what exactly was going on inside my mind. But this story wouldn’t let me go. So I didn’t fight it. I followed it.

Dreams — The mother of all creation

The Somewhere Aching series began with a dream I had in 2017 — vivid, unsettling, and strangely beautiful. The entire first book mirrors that dream almost exactly… until the ending. When I reached the point where the antagonist had to die, I realized something uncomfortable: he wasn’t just a villain. He was my shadow. My alter ego. And killing him off felt like killing a part of myself. So instead, I built him a redemption arc.

Because I’m a new indie author trying to gain traction with a story that is, frankly, bizarre, I wanted to share a little of the “why” behind it. If you want the deep dive, join my newsletter or check out the annotation cards in Aching Hearts Books & Merch on Shopify, but here’s the heart of it:

I wrote this story because pieces of it are my story.

Nicolas — my charismatic, desperate, love‑addicted antihero — is a young man who has never felt loved for even a second. Abandoned, neglected, and starving for connection, he begins the story at twenty‑five with one mission: find someone who will never leave him. I haven’t lived his trauma, but I understand the ache that drives him. I poured my own lifelong longing — to be seen, to be heard, to share the stories inside me — into his obsession with love. Writing him toward healing felt like writing myself toward possibility.

A Broken Boy

Why male childhood trauma? Because we dismiss it. We mock it. We minimize it. And yet I’ve known men like Nicolas — needy, magnetic, manipulative, charming, lost. Men who use seduction as a shield and intimacy as a bargaining chip. I love my broken boy, even when he spirals. Especially when he spirals. But I refused to “fix” him quickly. Trauma doesn’t vanish in a montage. Healing is slow, uneven, and sometimes ugly. Parts of you will always be somewhere aching. That’s the truth I wanted to honor.

There’s a comedian, Anjelah Johnson, who jokes about how behavior is judged differently depending on how attractive someone is. That bit floated through my mind as I wrote the abduction‑turned‑seduction scene in book one. I imagined myself lonely, exhausted, and suddenly swept into the orbit of an impossibly beautiful man who wants nothing more than to worship me. Would I run? Or would I… hesitate?

Nicolas abducts Martha because he believes she is the woman destined to love him. It’s absurd. It’s unhinged. And yet, in the twisted logic of trauma, it makes a terrible kind of sense. He is convinced he can take away her pain with devotion, affection, and heat — and he’ll break any law to prove it.

Martha carries another shard of me. A therapist, an empath, a woman grieving the life she thought she’d have. She wants change but doesn’t know how to reach for it. When she realizes Nicolas is more danger to himself than to her, she uses every skill she has to help him face his past. Their relationship begins with desperation, but it becomes a lifeline — for both of them.

Angry Tears

And then there’s Judith. The true center of the series. I wrote her exactly as she appeared in my dream: a vain, insecure beauty queen hiding a secret. She wields her trauma like a blade. When her mother goes missing, Judith wants blood. She wants redemption. She wants to prove she’s not the selfish daughter she fears she is. And when she meets Justin — the cop who seems too perfect — she falls hard. Too hard. Because perfection always hides something. And Justin’s righteousness is the most dangerous thing about him.

Here’s the final thing I’ll tell you:

The man Judith is hunting — the man she intends to kill — is the one person on earth who truly understands her. The one person capable of loving her the way she aches to be loved.

This is a story of soulmates, fate, forgiveness, and the courage to break free from the wounds that shaped you.

If you crave complexity, slow‑earned redemption, and love stories twisted by trauma but healed by truth, this series is for you.

I wrote this for you if:

Love that hurts

• You’ve loved someone who hurt you

• You’ve walked the long road back from trauma

• You understand the pull of self‑destruction and the fight to rise above it

  
  

Fiction should be more than entertainment. It should take us somewhere — into the dark, into the light, into ourselves. It should give us a place to cry, to feel, to breathe. Yes, it should be sexy and suspenseful and addictive. But beneath all that, it should have a heartbeat.

If you agree, join my newsletter. Give my books a chance.

Help me make this dream real, and I will spend the rest of my life writing you stories that ache, heal, and satisfy the soul.

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