October 2025
I don’t really know where Witherthorn came from.
It wasn’t planned — but then, neither was Gravethorn.
Gravethorn began because I was reading Joel’s blog.
I loved how open he was — how he just wrote from wherever he was, without trying to be perfect or profound. It made me realise how much I missed writing in that way. Around the same time, I stumbled into the idea of shadow journaling — writing from the parts of yourself you usually hide. The thoughts that live under the surface.
One night I opened a blank page, late, when the house was quiet, and I started typing.
I wasn’t trying to create anything.
I just wanted to feel something move through me again.
That night became Gravethorn.
And somehow, it became more than a blog — it became a home.
My shadow journal, my mirror, my confession box. A place to put the things that don’t fit anywhere else.
Now there’s Witherthorn.
And again, it wasn’t something I set out to build — it just started forming in the stillness.
When Tilly’s at her dad’s and Joel’s at his, the house goes quiet in a very particular way.
It’s not lonely in the sad sense — just echoing.
Like there’s too much air between the walls.
I’ve realised I miss the structure I had when I was writing my dissertation — that focus, that deep dive, the way research becomes its own rhythm. I loved that sense of building something out of nothing, slowly, patiently.
Maybe Witherthorn came from that same place — the part of me that still wants to study and make sense of things, even if the things this time are ghosts instead of governance codes.
Witherthorn isn’t a story in the usual way.
It’s more like a historical archive — a haunted island that refuses to die.
Each century, someone tries to rebuild it, and each time it ends the same way: collapse, fever, madness, loss.
I’m structuring it as four dossiers, each one a different century:
- The 1800s: a grieving lady’s descent into séances
- The 1940s: the manor turned into a sanatorium
- The 1980s: a failed luxury spa built over the ruins
- The 2020s: a modern investigator who realises she’s part of the bloodline that started it all
Every piece is a fragment — a letter, a photo, a field report, a whisper.
It’s not told. It’s found.
And the reader doesn’t follow a story — they uncover it.
What’s strange is how naturally it connects back to Gravethorn.
They’re built from the same bones.
If Gravethorn is my inner world — my feelings, my healing, my ghosts — then Witherthorn is the outer echo: the landscape of what came before, the inheritance of memory and decay.
It’s the same heart, just told through history instead of confession.
When I can’t sleep, I build the island.
When I miss them, I catalogue ghosts.
It’s how I fill the quiet — with something that feels alive.
I think, deep down, this is what creativity really is for me:
a way to turn absence into meaning.
To use the silence instead of fighting it.
To build something steady out of the nights that feel too long.
Gravethorn will always be the part of me that speaks in the dark.
Witherthorn is what happens when the dark starts answering back.
🕯️ Maybe it isn’t about escaping the quiet — maybe it’s about learning to build something beautiful inside it.