Dead Ground Report no.3
"The Secret Animal."
(Ya girl has a new look^^)
I first decided I wanted to be a novelist in the dying half of Year Eleven. Before that, I wrote fanfiction. Not in the way people say they “wrote fanfiction” with a wink and a blush—as if it was silly or embarrassing—but in the way you might spend hours building a little cardboard town and then refuse to let your parents throw it out. I wrote creepypasta, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Bendy and the Ink Machine, old Disney movies turned sideways into horror. I poured myself into them. They probably should have been terrible, but I gave them so much time and attention they might as well have been masterpieces. I didn't care about canon or craft. I cared about getting the feeling right. That uncanny thrill, the way a sentence could feel like it was watching you back.
I never really thought about writing a “real” book. I knew real books existed, obviously. You could trip over them in the school library, the bookstore, shoved into bags by teachers with glittery bookmarks and half-hearted reading logs. But I didn’t realize that regular people—normal, lumpy, messy, bored people—could make them. Books were made by Authors, capital-A, mysterious and clean and ancient. Not kids. Not me.
Flash forward to Year Eleven. I was just so alone.
The year had cracked itself open like a ribcage. We were studying the Vietnam War in History, reading Frankenstein in English, and stumbling through the useless geometry of Pythagoras in Math. I couldn’t tell you what I ate for breakfast most mornings, but I could tell you exactly how many soldiers died at Long Tan. I could tell you what it meant for a creature to look into its creator’s eyes and see nothing but horror.
Some days it felt like I was walking through a dream I’d already had. The school halls hummed with fluorescent lights, the corners too bright or too empty. My friends, when they were there, seemed like strangers wearing my friends’ clothes. I wasn’t bullied, not really. But I wasn’t known either. And that is its own kind of haunt.
So I needed an escape. But more than that—I needed a door.
That’s when I decided: I’m going to write a novel. A real one.
I didn’t have a plot. I didn’t have characters. I didn’t even have a name. But I had the impulse. The kind that grabs your collar and drags you somewhere dark. I opened a blank document and just stared. The white space felt like the inside of a snow globe, a blizzard with no center. I didn’t know how to start, but I knew I had to.
Writing fanfiction had taught me how to play with shadows. Writing a novel meant I had to grow my own. It meant stepping into the void and pretending it might love me back. It was terrifying. It was magic.
Looking back, that moment wasn’t glamorous. There was no music. Just a tired teenager with a cracked laptop and a heart full of ghosts. But something happened that day—a shift. I stopped being someone who wrote for fun and started being someone who would write even when it wasn’t fun. Someone who had to.
And honestly? I think that’s when the haunting really began.
Lungs was my first novel. Or at least, the start of one. I still think about it sometimes, like a pet I left behind on the side of the road. It didn’t breathe quite right. The jungles in the pages felt like sets I’d built out of cardboard and green paint, too clean around the edges, like they were waiting for someone else’s characters to walk through them. It still felt like fanfiction, but warped—cut free from canon and left to drift. Still, it was mine. Every shaky line of it.
I scrapped it.
Not with ceremony. Just one day I stopped opening the file. Let it rot behind the other icons. I told myself I could always go back. I never did.
Next came Butchers and Dogs.
Just a better version of the last one, really. Still full of jungle. Still full of ghosts. Still full of me, bleeding out between the lines. I worked on it in secret—at lunch, late at night, sometimes in class with one ear on the teacher and the other listening for footsteps down a jungle path I’d made up. I didn’t tell anyone about my book. Not a single person. It felt too fragile, too strange. Like saying it aloud might kill it.
Or worse: like saying it aloud might kill me.
I was still so alone. Not in the dramatic way. No one slammed lockers into me or laughed when I walked past. But I could go whole days without speaking to anyone who really saw me. The kind of silence that doesn’t just sit next to you but climbs inside your body, moves in behind your ribs.
I worked on Butchers and Dogs for a little over a year. Finished a first draft in a flurry of half-belief and exhaustion. I remember pressing save. The quiet click of it. Like a door locking behind me.
Then I didn’t look at it for eight months.
The loneliness didn’t get better. It got worse. Only worse. It was in the walls by then, in the glow of the screen. Even writing started to feel like speaking into water, watching the bubbles rise and break before they could reach the air.
No one asked what I was working on.
No one ever had.
But I kept going. Because even if the books weren’t real to anyone else, they were real to me. Real enough. Enough to haunt me. Enough to keep me here.
Now that I have my book Wolverine Frogs coming out, people ask me what else I’ve written. What led me here. What the path looked like.
I never know how to answer.
Because the truth is, the path is mostly bones.
I’ve shelved more projects than I can count—more than I want to count. They trail behind me like shadows with names. I can’t possibly talk about them all. It would take hours, maybe days. I'd lose track. I'd start feeling them in the room with me.
But there are a few I remember. A few that still knock sometimes, just to let me know they're still alive.
Lungs, for one. My first novel. Or what I thought might be a novel. The one with the jungles that felt like theatre backdrops, the plot stitched together like something I’d dreamed and half-forgotten by morning. It felt like fanfiction of a book I hadn't written yet. I loved it so much it embarrassed me. I killed it anyway.
Then Butchers and Dogs. My first real attempt. The same jungle, maybe. The same ghosts. I finished a draft. Left it untouched for eight months like it was cursed. Maybe it was. I don’t remember how it ends. I’m not sure I ever knew.
There was The Sound of Music—not the musical, not even close. Just a placeholder title for a strange little story about a girl who hears something in the walls and starts writing messages to it. I don’t think I saved the last version. Sometimes I worry it's still whispering to someone.
Rattlesnakes was a desert book. Harsh and dry and beautiful in that way roadkill can be beautiful. Everyone bled too easily in that one. The sentences were brittle and sharp. I think I wanted it to hurt.
Boneshaker. I barely remember the plot—just that it smelled like metal and rain, and someone was always knocking on a door that wasn’t there. A story full of people trying to be remembered. I think I buried it on purpose.
Devil Horns was the loudest. Full of screaming, guitars, monster boys, and girls who made deals they didn’t understand. I thought it might become something. I still do, sometimes, but I’m afraid of what it might become into.
All these stories, these half-born books—I don’t know if I’ll ever come back to them. They might wait there forever, gathering dust in old folders, lurking at the corners of my memory. Not dead. Just dormant.
It’s eerie, really. To think that somewhere in the dark archive of my own mind, there are people I created who are still waiting. Still calling.
And now, with Wolverine Frogs ou in the world, I wonder if they’re jealous.
If they’re angry.
If they know I haven’t forgotten.
I graduate high school with a blank space where a future was supposed to go. No great plans. No big dreams. Just a slow, quiet panic I tried to laugh off when people asked me what I was going to do. I didn’t know. I really didn’t. I drifted through that summer like a ghost with a sunburn.
That night—warm, late, not long after the ceremony—my dad got drunk and told me a story. Remember? One of his old ones. I won’t repeat it here. It wasn’t the story that mattered. It was the way he told it, like he needed me to understand something he couldn’t say straight. Like there was a message buried in it, shivering just under the words.
Later that night, I sat on the floor of my bedroom and reopened Butchers and Dogs. The file blinked open like a wound I’d forgotten about. I read it in full. The whole strange, snarling thing. I didn’t know what it was—still don’t, really—but I thought maybe I could make something of it. Just maybe. Maybe I could do that with all the old stories. The ones that still scratched at the door.
I closed the file. Put it away again.
Didn’t look at it for another eight months.
In the meantime, I wandered. Milled around town like I was waiting to be picked up by something invisible. I worked odd jobs. I stared at the ceiling. I tried to carve a path forward with nothing but a pocketknife and bad instincts.
In that time, I shelved another two books.
We Won’t Ever Leave was one of them. A gritty little ghost of a crime novel, all rain-slick streets and teeth clenched too hard. The other was The Devil Looked a Lot Like You, which was worse. In a good way. A little unhinged. A little too much like me.
I miss them both. More than I should. But I move only forward. That’s the rule. That’s the promise.
I title a document Wolverine Frogs. Wrote the basic plot in a little notebook I kept in my bag, the cover already half-peeled from wear. The notes didn’t look like much. Just bullet points and scraps. But they felt different. Alive. Like something had finally climbed out of the river and asked to be seen.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I might actually have something.
Something that could live.
Something that might follow me all the way out.
I didn’t tell anyone I was writing Wolverine Frogs.
Not when I started, not when I hit the middle, not when I realized it might actually be something. I kept it quiet. Hidden. A secret animal I fed in the dark.
A whole year passed like that.
I wrote in the silent hours, in stolen moments, behind closed doors and glowing screens. No outlines pinned to the walls, no dramatic declarations at dinner. Just me, alone, pulling a story out of the murk like something half-alive. It wasn’t about shame. Not exactly. It was something else. Something quieter and stranger. Like I had to keep the spell unbroken. Like if I said it out loud, it might die.
And then, one day, it was finished.
Not perfect. Not even good, maybe. But finished. A full thing. A book. Edited multiple times. I held it in my hands—the printed draft, thick and uneven and real—and felt something move behind my ribs, like an echo finally catching up to itself.
When I told my family, they were happy for me.
Smiles. Nods. A few surprised questions. "Oh wow, a whole book?" My dad said he was proud. My step-mum hugged me in that distracted way, like she was already thinking about something else. My sister asked what it was about, and when I told her, she said, “That’s… weird,” and changed the subject.
They didn’t get it. They never will.
And I’ve stopped trying to make them.
They don’t understand what it means to live with a story inside you for that long. To build it out of nothing, word by word, and give it breath. To walk around all day with a part of yourself that no one knows exists. It’s not their fault. I don’t blame them. But the distance is there now, like fog between us.
I love them. But I don’t belong to them the way I used to.
I belong too the thing I made.
Wolverine Frogs is out in the world now. People will read it. Maybe some will understand it. Maybe some won’t. But it’s no longer just mine, and I’m learning how to live with that. Still, I think I’ll always miss the quiet year I kept it to myself. When it was only me and the frogs and the dark.
That was the last time I felt completely unseen, and completely free.
But I didn’t just want to write a novel. That was never really the point.
I wanted people to read it.
That quiet ache—unspoken, but ever-present—sat behind every word I wrote. Like a shadow over my shoulder. I wanted someone out there to find Wolverine Frogs on a shelf, or a screen, or crumpled in the bottom of their bag and feel that flicker: this was made for me. Even if it wasn’t. Especially if it wasn’t.
Still, when it actually happened—when it sold—I was shocked. No, that’s not even the word. It was something colder, stranger. Like my body hadn’t caught up yet. Like I’d stepped outside myself and was watching it all unfold from the far side of the room.
I’d never been that shocked in my life.
The email came in the middle of the day. I didn’t tell anyone until much later. I walked around like a haunted thing, fingers buzzing, eyes hot. Then, late that night, when the world had quieted down and I could hear my own breath again, I re-opened Butchers and Dogs.
I hadn’t looked at it in a long time. It was still rough, still strange—half-formed in some places, bloated in others. But I read a few pages. Really read them.
And then I closed the document.
I got it.
I finally, finally got it.
I could do something with this. Not just this, but all of it. All the stories I’d left behind. The ones I thought were too broken or too weird or too me. I understood now—they weren’t dead. Just sleeping. Waiting for me to come back different. Sharper. Braver.
I opened a new document.
Titled it This Could Be Religion.
And I meant it.
Because there’s something sacred about that moment. The page, the possibility, the hush before a story opens its mouth again. I used to think I was writing into the dark, calling out to no one. Now I know I was building something—word by word, breath by breath. A cathedral of my own making.
The frogs were only the beginning.
Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, feel free to buy me coffee: https://ko-fi.com/fennnii
Also, my debut novel, Wolverine Frogs is now available for pre-order: https://amzn.asia/d/4cH91xB
Wolverine Frogs is a grief-drenched road trip through ruthless country, where love is a trap and monsters where familiar faces.