I’ve always loved stories. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a writer, though I first took a more visual route and studied illustration at university. Those Old Gods began during that time as a creative project about personified mental health conditions and a young woman who could see invisible beings that others couldn’t. Back then, I imagined it as a graphic novel — strange, emotional, a little dark, and already far too complicated for its own good.

I found my way back to writing during lockdown. What began as a visual project slowly transformed into prose, and the world expanded into something much bigger: old gods, divine bureaucracy, haunted rules, queer grief, and characters who keep surviving things they absolutely should not. I still hope to include illustrations in the full novel, Those Old Gods: Juno, and some of the original artwork remains part of the project’s beginnings.