The Story Behind the Story

I never set out to write This Kingdom Will Bleed as a way to tell my own story. In fact, the idea began in the most ordinary of places: an empty IHOP at around eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning, sitting across from my best friend over breakfast. We were both readers, and I remember telling him about this vague idea I had for a book. I didn't have everything figured out. I didn't know what the story would become or where it would take me. But he was immediately excited. He told me I had to write it because he wanted to read it, and one day, he wanted to be able to tell everyone that this entire story started with an idea shared between two friends over breakfast on a random Wednesday morning.

A year later, he passed away.

And I stopped writing.

For a long time, I couldn't bring myself to return to the story. It was difficult to create something when one of the people I had imagined sharing it with was no longer here to read it. But grief has a strange way of changing you. I have lost two great friends far earlier than they ever should have gone, and I know the anger, the guilt, the sadness, the questions, and the emptiness that follows. I know what it is like to keep moving through your life while carrying a hole that never completely disappears. I also know that grief doesn't mean we stop loving the people we've lost. Sometimes, it means learning how to carry that love somewhere new.

Eventually, I found my way back to this story.

What started as a vague idea over breakfast became something much bigger than I ever expected. This Kingdom Will Bleed became, in many ways, a love letter to the people I have lost and to the person I had to become after losing them. It is a story about love, loss, anger, survival, and what happens when the things we carry inside us become too powerful to keep buried. But more than anything, it is a reminder that we cannot live our entire lives inside our grief. We have to keep going. We have to keep loving. We have to keep allowing ourselves to experience joy, even when part of us is still hurting.

And perhaps most importantly, we have to remember not to take the people we love for granted. Because sometimes we don't realize we're living through a moment for the last time until it's already a memory.

So this series is for them.

And it is for me.

For the people who have had to learn how to live with an empty chair at the table, an unanswered text, a favorite memory that suddenly hurts, or a story they wish they could tell someone who isn't there to hear it anymore.

And for anyone who has ever had to find a way forward while still carrying the people they love with them.