There’s an image that never left me: a girl in an underground storage room, counting winter squash. Not in the kitchen bustling. Not talking to anyone. Just her, alone, quiet, methodical — counting because she was afraid they wouldn’t make it through winter.
I was in a tight place myself when I wrote that scene. Not physically. The kind of tight where you don’t know what you’re doing, or why any of it matters.
I had just decided to write an English werewolf romance. The decision itself was absurd. English isn’t my first language. I’d never written fiction before. I didn’t know what Dreame was, or how to spell “mate bond trope.” But I couldn’t let go of that image. That girl deserved a story.
So I started.
There was nothing graceful about how I wrote. No clean workflow, no smooth rhythm. Chapter after chapter, rewritten three or four times before it was barely passable. Somewhere in the middle I kept asking myself: who’s going to read an English werewolf romance written by a Chinese woman? I had to look up how many claws a wolf had.
But I kept going. Thirty-five chapters. Stumbling the whole way. Sometimes I rewrote a chapter four times. Sometimes I cried, got up, got a glass of water, and came back. Lena and Caelan went from the storage room to the council hall. Mira and Cask went from misunderstanding to coded messages. Selene went from goodbye to the snowfields. They walked a long road. I walked a long road beside them.
When I wrote the last chapter, something clicked.
The girl counting winter squash in the storage room — she never came out. She didn’t need to. That room was how she existed: quietly, carefully, counting what she had, one by one. And all those thirty-five chapters I stumbled through? I was counting my own things too. Every chapter saying: this is mine. This matters. I am here.
That’s why I wrote this book. Not because market analysis said werewolf romances sell. Not because I had literary dreams. Just because that girl was standing in a storage room, and I needed to open the door for her.
She’s out now.
So am I.
📖 SEEN — Book 1 complete. All 35 chapters written, now serializing.