Creating Mary

Writing The Dominion: Stepping Into Her Silence

When I began writing The Dominion, I didn’t start with monsters in the woods or ancient pages turning on their own.

I started with a woman.

To write her honestly, I had to place myself in her shoes. That wasn’t easy. She is quiet. Loyal. Loving. Timid in a way the world often overlooks. A Christian woman who believes deeply in binding herself to her husband—not out of weakness, but out of conviction.

But conviction does not mean she doesn’t feel.

I did not want her to be a shadow in her own home. I didn’t want her to exist only in reaction to the men around her. She had to have her own inner world—her own dreams, her own disappointments, her own quiet conversations with God.

She carries a chronic migraine condition, and that detail became more than physical. It became symbolic. The world presses in on her constantly. Light hurts. Noise hurts. Stress hurts. And still she moves through her days trying to keep the family steady.

There is a quiet defeat in her—not dramatic, not explosive. The kind many people live with. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but settles slowly over time.

When Luke finally has to admit his infidelity, I felt something shift as I wrote it. Not anger first—but a strange, aching sense of justification. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t imagining distance. She wasn’t overreacting.

The truth hurt.

But it also validated what her heart had known.

As I wrote that scene, I felt her hurt. I felt the breaking of trust. I felt the fracture running through the family dynamic—not just between husband and wife, but through the children, the home, the very air in the room.

It brought tears to my eyes.

Not because it was dramatic.

But because it was real.

One of the most difficult things about writing The Dominion was realizing that the horror in the story is not just supernatural. It isn’t only ancient forces or unseen darkness. Sometimes the true fracture begins in the quiet places—where loyalty is strained, where faith is tested, where entertainment and distraction slowly erode connection.

To write her was to confront something deeper: that strength doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it endures.

And sometimes endurance costs more than rebellion ever would.

If readers feel her pain, her restraint, her quiet dignity—it’s because I had to sit in it first. I had to let myself feel it fully.

That is the part of writing no one sees.

But it is the part that makes the story breathe.